Blink-182 members (from left to right) Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker.
Even if you never went through a punk-rock phase in eighth grade, you can’t possibly have missed blink-182.
Riding the wave of pop-punk music that rose in the mid-’90s, blink-182 became a staple of popular music for anyone our age. Along with bands like Green Day, Sum 41 and Good Charlotte, the band defined everything that was cool about rock music at our most impressionable age, becoming one of our symbols of youth in revolt before we knew any better. This month marks the 20th anniversary of blink-182’s first album, Cheshire Cat, the launch of a punk rock tour de force.
Transcending marginal punk music, blink-182 broke into the mainstream with what seemed to be relative ease. While the band’s first two albums provided its rapid rise in the punk-rock world, it was its third album, 1999’s Enema of the State, that began drawing mainstream listeners, including our young elementary-age selves. Hits like “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things” (which is not called “Say It Ain’t So,” contrary to popular belief) made it onto the radio and into our ears.
The band stood out from its contemporaries with obvious singularity. As two uncannily distinct vocalists, Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus made listening interesting, switching off vocal parts and nailing harmonies. However, DeLonge’s voice is the one people still love to impersonate, whining out the chorus of “All The Small Things.”
The trio would have been nowhere as complete without drummer Travis Barker, who joined the band before Enema of the State. One of the greatest rock drummers of the past few decades, Barker’s brilliant syncopation rivals any drum track. He even played entire shows with only his left hand, as his right was in a cast.
Then the guys of blink-182 gave us the soundtrack to our adolescences. Theirs were the songs that washed our birthday parties and bar mitzvahs in the twang of punk guitars and the clash of unapologetic cymbals and drums. Theirs were the voices that whined on the radio as our parents drove us to middle school, or a friend’s house or perhaps our Little League games. Theirs was the music that first compelled us to headbang and raise up our hands — left palm up, right strumming near our hip — to perform the instinctual “air guitar.”
And suddenly, blink-182 grew up with us. As we matured, the band from our childhood matured as well. Blink-182 progressed from juvenile butt jokes (a bull’s rear-end dominates the cover of 1997’s Dude Ranch) to masturbation jokes (2001’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket) to no jokes at all.
The accelerated growth was noticeable. From the beginning, the guys had always sung about love and relationships. But soon, blink-182 went from addressing issues with parents and having a girlfriend to marriage and divorce. Growing dark but not quite brooding, their two most recent albums touched on themes of loss, depression, addiction and death.
The band went into “indefinite hiatus” in 2005, and DeLonge left the band. The members talked again after Barker was in a plane crash in 2008. At the February 2009 Grammy Awards, the band was back together onstage for the first time since the breakup.
But the band’s most recent controversies have begun besmirching my memories of blink-182. After some confusing back-and-forth bickering between DeLonge and the other two band members, it seems he’s out of the band. DeLonge has also been in the public eye for an interview published last week in which the singer discussed getting his phone tapped by the government and his belief in aliens and mind control.
With the gossip media hungrily circling the band that defined our youth, I feel obliged to invoke one of blink-182’s own songs and say: “Stay Together for the Kids.”
We grew up with these guys. We played them through school and into college, through parties and high school drama. Seeing them now in this state is like seeing a close friend you grew up with drop out of school, turn to drugs and piss all over the great promise they once had.
Still very much relevant, blink-182 has endured as a linchpin of modern rock; even artists such as Mumford & Sons and Owl City have cited the band as their inspiration. But with its future now very much in question, we can only hope that blink-182 manages to pull itself back together.
