Every now and then I get on my marching band freak. I love marching bands. I may have mentioned that.

Generally, I love the USC marching band. The Spirit of Troy, as the kids in sunglasses and plumed helmets prefer to be known.

I would never say they are America’s best marching band. They are not. That honor would go to Michigan or Ohio State, I should think. Wisconsin, maybe.

But the USC band is plenty loud — they dial it up higher than “10” more than once in a while — and I am familiar with their repertoire, having covered lots of Trojans football at the Coliseum.

And this is one of my favorites:

In The Kids Aren’t Alright, the USC marching band takes on the best-known song by an Orange County punk band, the Offspring.

If you search YouTube, you can find dozens of versions of the USC band playing The Kids Aren’t Alright (sic).

This version happens to be my fave, at the moment, because Somebody’s Mom was up close and got pretty much the full impact of a bunch of college kids playing their (mostly brass) instruments as loudly as they possibly can.

Doesn’t hurt that the cheerleaders are doing their thing, or that the flute players in the front row have a whole choreographed routine and that the whole of it is going down at Trafalgar Square in London in the Olympic summer of 2012.

Many find it amusing that a marching band should play punk rock, but it works just fine, thank you. Lots of frenetic energy in there, along with that Wall of Sound. (And this Wall of Sound is way beyond what Phil Spector ever imagined.) It rattles your spleen and shakes your small intestine and bashes into your ears, the way a marching band’s music should when it’s aimed in your general direction. And you notice the brass players taking big pauses between phrases so that they can suck in a bunch more oxygen and produce even more sound.

Go ahead. Play it. Annoy your friends and relatives. Crank it up all the way to 11. Be amazed that it appears to be maybe half of the USC band. At most. That is not the full eardrum-blasting band there.

And in the final 30 seconds, listen for the passage when you can actually hear the clarinets. And then when you cannot.

Great stuff.