Blink-182 are a punk rock dividing line. Green Day’s Dookie and The Offspring’s Smash
proved that a punk rock band could, with the correct pop inflection, sell several million records.
But Enema of the State showed that songs about girls, partying and prank phone
calls were not only lucrative but also ripe for repetition.
With their preference for video clip nudity and gross-out stage banter, alongside American
Pie and South Park, blink were the Zeitgeist of 1999. And their blockbuster single that
reflected on this immaturity would blast them way beyond the punk rock community .
This is the story of how “What’s My Age Again?” kinda ruined Punk forever.
By 1998, Blink-182 were well on their way to become “the next Green Day.”
“Dammit” had become a massive hit on modern rock radio.
Parent album Dude Ranch had quietly reached Gold certification,
their second record selling ten times the amount of their debut in only 8 months.
Composed of dual vocalists Mark Hoppus and Tom Delonge on bass and guitar respectively
and Scott Raynor on drums, blink-182 were a new breed of punk rock band. Whereas three
years earlier Green Day were tormented by the accusations of selling out from their
punker-than-thou Gilman Street fanbase, no such ethical dilemma plagued Blink when they
signed to major MCA in 1996.
“I’d like to make a lot of money and fuck credibility. People make so much out of something
that’s just the band trying to get ahead and get its music to as many fans as possible.”
Sessions for their major label debut would start in December 1996, joined by producer
Mark Trombino, chosen as he had just worked on Delonge’s favourite band Jimmy Eat World’s Static Prevails.
”I was excited but also nervous and intimidated.
I felt weird that there were these guys who had sold way more records than I had ever
sold and I’m sitting in the producer’s chair telling them what to do.”
Specifically for Dude Ranch the band had been influenced by recent
listening habits like Jawbreaker, Bad Religion and Lagwagon.
The focus for the band beyond anything was to write great songs, stuff that their young
fanbase could instantly relate to. Even if there’s scatological comedy skits interspersed throughout,
the majority of the album is preoccupied in the ups and downs of teenage relationships.
“The songs were definitely what mattered. It was the only goal we ever really set for
ourselves as a band. To write great songs. We might not play every show perfectly,
we might not hit every note right, we might not have the best performance,
but we had good songs.”
Dude Ranch was released in June 1997, and pretty much immediately local alternative
stations like KROQ had started playing “Dammit,” which fit in with the Green Day and Offspring
songs that were cornerstones of their playlists. They gained traction as they toured worldwide
alongside Pennywise, Lagwagon and Social Distortion on the Vans Warped Tour in the summer of 1997.
But after nine months together on the road, tensions were rising within the band.
Raynor was not having a good time, tired and homesick he was constantly at odds with his bandmates,
and his self medicating with alcohol was exacerbating the situation.
“That was the worst tour ever. Nobody showed up. At that time, our drummer had a drinking problem.
One show he dropped his sticks 10 times. It was so disturbing to see someone ruining himself.”
By summer of 1998, he was let go, replaced full time by The Aquabats’ drummer Travis Barker.
More technically proficient than Raynor, Barker learnt how to play blink’s set in 45 minutes.
The chorus of “Adam’s Song,” which would become their next album’s third single,
was written about Hoppus’s depression while on tour,
being acutely aware that he had no one to return to when it finished.
“Tom and Travis always had girlfriends waiting back home, so they had something to look forward
to at the end of the tour. But I didn’t, so I was lonely on tour. But then I got home
and it didn’t matter, because there was nothing there for me anyway.”
As the year petered out, blink wanted to continue their momentum and were looking at starting
on their follow up.
In January 1999, blink-182 began working on Enema of the State. For producer they went
with Jerry Finn who had recorded “Mutt” with them for the American Pie soundtrack,
and had also engineered Green Day’s Dookie and mixed Jawbreaker’s Dear You.
The addition of Barker, who completed his recordings for the album in 8 hours,
launched the band to the next level.
“It was like, ‘Now anything’s possible, we can play any kind of song.’
Mark and I instantly played better because we were keeping up with someone who played everything
perfectly so we became a lot better at that time. We were nowhere near as good as Travis,
but we got better.”
Lyrically their songs didn’t evolve much thematically from what was on Dude Ranch -
topics still included broken hearts, sex and general immaturity. The main difference was Finn,
who helped shape and refine the tracks to pop perfection,
along with mixing from Tom Lord-Alge, soon to be the go-to guy to polish a pop punk anthem for radio.
Throughout the songs are infused with youthfulness and summertime fun, Delonge and Hoppus are
able to write perfectly from the point-of-view of their teenaged audience, because they themselves
were them, and still act like them.
''We are exactly the same as kids hanging out in high school or junior high,
making fart jokes and talking about girls. Tom always wonders, if you gave a 14-year-old kid a microphone
and a bunch of people to say something in front of, what would he say? That's us.
Although I'm 27.''
This could also be why the album is dusted with casual sexism, such as on opener “Dumpweed”
which sounds like something a 14-year-old minded boy in 1999 would say.
However it is immediately followed by “Don’t Leave Me” and its pleading for forgiveness.
The songs about relationships are the ones that their fanbase related to most, like their
second single “All The Small Things,” which at the time of recording was known as “Babycakes-Buttermuffin,”
or “Going Away to College.”
“A lot of people I talked to, especially the girls, liked the songs that Mark wrote
about relationships falling apart. When we went into this [album], there weren’t many
[relationship songs], so I asked Mark to write another breakup song. He came back the next
day with ‘Going Away to College.’”
But another one of Hoppus’ songs about relationships going awry and immaturity
would be their break into the mainstream.
One of the first tracks written for Enema of the State was “What’s My Age Again?”
Hoppus had written the iconic arpeggiated opening riff
inspired by the band that cracked pop-punk into the mainstream.
Initially Hoppus had earmarked his new riff for a vulgar joke song in the tradition of
“Fuck a Dog” or “Family Reunion,”
but the more he played it the more potential it seemed to have.
Lyrically “What’s My Age Again?” is the inverse of “Dammit;”
where Hoppus begrudgingly accepts that he needs to choke down the heartache of seeing
his ex with someone else with some maturity.
In “What’s My Age Again?” he combats that with a bratty “But why?”
“It’s about being in my 20s and acting like a jackass teenager. It is absolutely
autobiographical. I still make prank phone calls, insult people, and put my foot in my
mouth. I drink too much. I can even eat a half dozen doughnuts in one sitting.
It makes me endearing, especially being in a band, but I’m the biggest letdown.”
The theme of not wanting to grow up had been touched on previously in pop-punk
but “What’s My Age Again?” made it a key trope of the genre.
The song is a lesson in efficiency, Hoppus having taken out a date,
caught up on his shows,
prank called her parents
and insulted her mother
all by the one minute mark.
With the simplicity of pop-punk, it’s the little differences in the format that stick with you.
For example, each chorus of “What’s My Age Again?” is subtly altered.
So each time it’s more of the same Barker-boosted sugar-coated hook but with a lyrical twist.
Despite the chorus lyrics,
Hoppus was 25 at time of writing, but “23” rhymes with “Away from me.”
The song’s original title, “Peter Pan Complex,” was vetoed by MCA because: one. “Peter Pan Complex”
isn’t mentioned in the lyrics, making it awkward for radio listeners to request it,
and unlike “Dammit (Growing Up)”
and “Josie (Everything’s Gonna Be Fine)”
the band didn’t want to add an unwieldy parenthesis. And two. They feared a lawsuit from Disney
who owned the Peter Pan character.
Its video would extend this forever childishness, with the band running through L.A. in nothing
but three shit-eating grins. Though in reality the shooting was a lot less amusing than it
was in the planning stages.
“I was the guy standing naked on the side of the street in Los Angeles with cars driving
by giving me the finger and shit. It’s funny watching the video now, but at the time,
it stopped being funny ten minutes in,
and it definitely wasn’t funny three days into it.”
The grins returned though when the clip started getting saturation play on MTV.
“What’s My Age Again?” was released as a single in April 1999.
It peaked at number two on the Billboard Modern Rock chart at the end of July
and was held off the top spot for ten weeks by Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Scar Tissue.”
It would also be the band’s first single to appear on the Hot 100, reaching number 58.
Enema of the State would go on to sell 15 million albums.
While radio play was helpful to blink’s success, a lot of it was MTV.
In 1999 Total Request Live was a huge deal, a daily rundown of what music videos were hot in the minds
of the teenage audience, it would feature the latest clips from pop artists like The
Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and N*Sync. But also blink.
And the “What’s My Age Again?” video was so very hot.
Follow up single “All The Small Things” was such a permanent fixture of the TRL rundown
that it had to be retired from the list. That video even poked fun at their new contemporaries;
no longer the likes of Warped tour-mates Pennywise, Lagwagon and Less Than Jake
but now boy bands and pop starlets.
And because each member could pass for as a more
tattooed Backstreet Boy, blink-182 managed to get something that no other punk band before
had managed to achieve: a mostly female audience. Just listen to the Beatlemania style screams
throughout their 2000 live album The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show.
Blink 182 were a punk dividing line. For better or worse.
A band who took the attitude, speed and need to piss people off from their ancestors
but rejected the feminist, anticorporate values and integrity of the early 90s wave of Nirvana, Riot Grrrl and Fugazi.
The latter befuddled the Blink boys by their DIY ethics.
“They play for only five bucks. They can easily go $15 and still sell out every venue and make shitloads,
but that’s not what they want to do. Personally, I think that’s stupid.”
Many hated that blink-182 is what punk now meant.
Kerrang!'s 1999 review of "What's My Age Again?" showed they weren't fans:
“Million-selling Yank fuckwits! ​With their moronic sense of humour and corporate approach,
blink-182 stand for just about everything that sucks about punk rock as we approach the millennium.”
In many ways they were just hair metal all over again, complete with its overt misogyny
something they eventually retired after realising how young their fanbase had become.
The fact that blink-182 could become pop-level huge meant that we would get a new wave of
snotty yet sugary bands in the blink-mode, all trying to achieve their level of fame
while maintaining some of their more troubling qualities.
And it all started with Enema…’s introductory single. Said Pierre Bouvier from Simple Plan.
“[In] 1999, “What’s My Age Again?” pushed the pop side even further and was all
over mainstream and pop radio around the world. You couldn’t turn the dial without hearing it.”
As overworn as the genre has become, on the verge of 2000, blink-182 were a breath of
fresh air: at the time of their first UK gigs the best comparison Melody Maker could make
was the more fleet-footed tracks from Scottish alt rock group Idlewild.
Whatever backlash there may have been and despite the many many lesser bands they inspired,
blink-182 still created some brilliant universal pop singles, twentysomethings of any era can
relate to not wanting to be the sensible adult all the time.
More than two decades on, “What’s My Age Again?,” “All The Small Things” and
“Adam’s Song” are still staples of rock clubs and Spotify playlists the world over
because no one encapsulated the confusions of young adulthood better.
Blink proved that no one should take themselves so seriously.
And that no one likes you when you’re 23.
Thanks for watching. What do you think? Are blink the root of evil in punk
or do you think they’re the best band ever? Let me know down below.
If you liked this video, why don’t you do me a favour and share it with a couple of people.
This way I don’t have to rely on YouTube to push my videos.
Thanks to Mic The Snare for voicing Mark Hoppus.
If you like my channel, you’ll love his. His deep dives on Paramore and Weezer are especially recommended.
I’d like to give a shout out to my new top tier patrons: AIDY SHAW, MARTY HERGERT & BRYAN ELLIOTT.
Thanks a bunch to all that support me. And I’ll see you in two weeks for that video I teased last time.