You Gotta Keep 'Em Separated
But 'em probably isn't what you're thinking of.
Howdy! It’s Joey, back with more Fun Fact Friyay. Hope you’re ready to come out and play (or at least return to the 90s for a moment).
The Offspring song “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated)” was inspired by flasks during a science experiment.
Last Friday, the Offspring released a new album, Supercharged. If you’re a fan of a band that’s been around for 40 years, what do you do when your favorite music comes out? You compare it to their old stuff, of course!
And if you’re looking at old Offspring stuff, you’ll probably come across Smash, which came out 30 years ago. It features the wildly popular songs “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” “Self Esteem,” and “Gotta Get Away.”
My personal favorite off the album is “What Happened to You?” — a ska-infused track with a cool little guitar solo that warns about the dangers of doing drugs. TIMELY EVEN TODAY.
To date, Smash has sold over 11 million copies and is the highest-selling independent record of all time. A big reason for the album’s success is “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” a song about youth gang violence that was the first single — and the last song written. (Technically, the song was just called “Come Out and Play” when it was released, though it’s been retconned to have the “(Keep ‘Em Separated)” part included.)
Holland may have a career as a rock star — he also flies planes, owns a hot sauce brand, runs triathlons, and collects stamps from the Isle of Man — but as the band was working on the album that would become Smash, he was working on a PhD in molecular biology.
He’s told this story many times, so let’s jump to a recent retelling from the Zach Sang Show. As Holland sets it up, people “think it’s all crazy experiments and boiling potions,” but molecular biology also features a lot of washing of Petri dishes.
“Everything has to be so sterile. You really spend a lot of time washing. Even after you wash it, it’s not sterile. You’ve gotta put it in an oven to bake it because the heat will kill it. But even that won’t kill everything, so the oven has to be a pressure cooker in order to pressurize. It’s a whole thing.”
If you feel like this is a boring process, you’re not alone. Holland found his mind wandering. He’s a fan of writing songs when he’s occupied with busy work, and washing dishes certainly applies.
“I made this stuff, this goo that I was going to pour into the Petri dishes. It’s very viscous, and it had to sit and cool under a hood, like an oven hood. It wasn’t cooling off, had two big flasks, they weren’t cooling off,” he said. “I touched it a little bit later because it’s so thick. It’s like, ‘F*ck, it’s been an hour.’ And I realized because they’re sitting next to each other, they’re giving heat to each other, right? This is the worst thing—I should be having them apart. I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s why they’re not cooling off. I gotta keep ‘em separated!’”
A light bulb went off.
“Keep ‘em separated—that sounds like a line,” Holland continued. “For some reason, it stuck with me. I kept thinking about that. And then, all of a sudden, I realized it fit in the cadence of the song I was writing, and it could be kind of like a tagline. And that was it. So, thank you. Thank you, graduate school.”
As for the actual “you gotta keep ‘em separated” line in the song? That was delivered by Jason “Blackball” Mclean. He was nicknamed “Blackball” because he always requested The Offspring’s song “Blackball,” which they no longer played live at shows. Eventually, his relentless bickering won them over; they made friends with him and invited him to deliver the line. Blackball had no formal voiceover training, yet based on how the song did, I’d say he nailed it.
The song took over the airwaves, and Weird Al Yankovic contacted the band to ask if he could do a parody called “Laundry Day” about keeping your white and colored clothes separate.
The band turned down the opportunity, but thankfully, they righted that wrong a few years later, allowing Weird Al to turn “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” into “Pretty Fly (For a Rabbi).”
We’ll wrap up here because, as Al says in the song: “Oy gevalt, I’m so verklempt that I could plotz.”
Here’s the entire clip from the interview if you want to learn some more about science! And, of course, feel free to rock out with the very low-budget music video.