She's Got Issues

In this song, The Offspring lead singer Dexter Holland has a girlfriend with issues, and he's paying the price. She uses him as a therapist, so they're always talking about her ex and her relationship with her father. He can't help her and is getting fed up with it. The song was inspired by the glut of trashy talk shows that proliferated in the '90s, like The Ricki Lake Show, The Jerry Springer Show, and The Maury Povich Show. Guests on these shows always had lots of issues and were happy to talk about them on national TV. The audience would judge them, often harshly. It was hard not to watch these shows because the guests were such train wrecks. The topic would be something like "my boyfriend wants me to get cosmetic surgery," and we'd meet some dopey dude pressuring his girl to get a boob job.

This is a track on The Offspring's fifth album, Americana, which looked rather sardonically at '90s culture. The group released the biggest-selling independent album of all time in 1994 with Smash on Epitaph Records, a punk label. They moved on to Columbia Records for their next one, Ixnay On The Hombre. Released in 1997, it didn't do nearly as well as Smash and it seemed like the Offspring were going to peter out along with the punk boom of the mid-'90s. Americana got them right back on top, though, when it was released in 1998. It sold over 5 million copies in America thanks to songs like "The Kids Aren't Alright" and "Why Don't You Get a Job?"

The Ricki Lake Show gets a mention in another track from the Americana album, "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)": So if you don't rate, just overcompensate At least you'll know you can always go on Ricki Lake