Come Out and Play
by The Offspring
- 160
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 52
- Danceability
- 7
- Acousticness
Within months of "Come Out and Play" becoming a hit, a claim landed at Epitaph Records. In 1994 Robbie Fields, owner of Posh Boy Records, said the two-bar Arabian guitar phrase copied the solo from "Bloodstains", a 1979 song by Agent Orange. He asked for one cent per copy of Smash sold, $60,000 or more at the time. The Offspring's manager Jim Guerinot called it baseless. A musicologist hired by Epitaph found the parts were not identical. No lawsuit was filed. The Offspring covered "Bloodstains" in 2000 for the film Ready to Rumble.
Epitaph released the song in August 1994 as the first single from Smash. Jed the Fish at KROQ-FM first brought attention to it, and it reached number one on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Dexter Holland wrote it about gang and school violence. He was a grad student then, commuting through East Los Angeles, and he was there the day of the L.A. riots. The line "you gotta keep 'em separated" came from his laboratory work cooling Erlenmeyer flasks of hot liquids. A friend and fan, Jason "Blackball" McLean, sang it.
Come Out and Play runs at 160 BPM, the tempo of footwork, gabber and fast metal. In classical terms it sits in vivace territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.5 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 375 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.