Photo: WENN
This week, Blink 182’s founding members split apart indefinitely – bringing a 22 year roller-coaster that defined teenage life more than high-school to an end. The chances are, if you lived through adolescence at any point during the early to mid-noughties, Blink spoke to you.
Take Off Your Pants and Jacket became a manifesto of carefree youth, the reference point for first dates, first kisses and crushing breakups – an anthem to those years of gangly, sweaty yet thrilling insecurity. Especially if you were a teenage boy. Think about that for a second. Then name a band who speaks for those “ugly, stupid, worthless” boys today. It says much, musically and socially, that the closest comparison the YouTube generation find are 5 Seconds of Summer – a straight up boy band limply offering splashes of hair dye to confirm their pop-punk credentials.
It’s enough to make the post Nirvana crowd who riled at Blink’s commercial aesthetic scream “I miss you” in sincere desperation. But there is more to this than appearance.
At their most influential, Blink stood as far apart from manufactured pop as they did the The Strokes’ Ramone inflected pretension. Instead, Blink’s songs tread a land of everyday relatability – representing the kids stuck on the middle table in the lunch hall, acting loud and stupid, fancying all the girls, but secretly scared as hell. The ingredients were simple yet effective. Guitar riffs and drum beats of relentless energy coupled with ludicrous lyrics. The song title “Fuck a Grandpa” a case in point. But scratch a little deeper, beneath stories of girls at rock shows, and the tales of emotion and vulnerability shine through.
'Dammit', 'Adam’s Song' and 'Story of a Lonely Guy' chronicle the realities of depression, relationship failure and rejection from an unmistakably male, yet refreshingly honest, perspective. To put it bluntly, these themes are what every guy feels but is never allowed to admit. We really do get nervous on days like the prom, and have all silently thought “oh no it’s happened again, she’s cool, she’s hot…she’s my friend”. In 2014 terms, Blink are, and were, Taylor Swift for men.
A group bringing pop back to reality; from free spirited fun, to reassuring quarter life crisis numbers, they are a band for every male moment. Yes, even ejaculating into a sock.
Of course at some point everyone has to grow up. Having pushed the genre to the stratosphere, the fact the band originally split in 2005 makes sense in retrospect. Despite 2003’s eponymous album proving their most complete, well-rounded record, the band members themselves had grown restless in their roles. Weary, they needed to taste adult life before they could convincingly ask what’s my age again? Lead singer, Tom DeLonge, has struggled most with resolving this conflict. Although drummer Travis Barker’s near fatal 2008 plane crash jolted the band into reformation, DeLonge remained keen to push himself beyond Blink.
It seems 2011’s Neighbourhoods, with its more mature sounds, failed to quench his thirst for progression. Without getting into the hornet’s nest of who is to blame for this latest separation, DeLonge admitted finding it “hard as hell to commit” to the band in a lengthy note to fans on Tuesday. The same cannot be said for Mark Hoppus, the joint leader, guitarist and co-vocalist, who remains alongside Barker. The pair have enlisted Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba for upcoming tour dates, buoyed by Hoppus’ belief that “the things that happen to you in high school are the same things that happen your entire life. You can fall in love at sixty; you can get rejected at eighty."
Still, without DeLonge’s vocals and identity, it is difficult to see how the band remain can remain anything but a shadow. One thing is for certain, age is no justification for Tom to call time. The band never cast themselves as age appropriate, instead playing with a carefree rejection of conformity. Sure, a number of the fans at recent gigs knew them from their previous albums. But Blink always were a nostalgia act. The Excalibur of youth. In amongst the dick jokes, there lay a keenly mature understanding of male life. And a sound that could evolve, given time.
The same cannot be said in the detached world of contemporary pop, where Pharrell, aged 41, is singing about blurred lines of consent. A concept Blink, and real boys (and men), never entertain. And this is the saddest part of the breakup. Blink remain more relevant than ever, but risk being seen as a relic of a different era. They remain part of a generation’s adolescence, who like Mark and Travis, can still enjoy the songs because they are comfortable being old enough to live young. In the words of Blink’s song on divorce, Stay Together for the Kids, Tom – here’s your holiday. Enjoy it this time. For guys growing up now, it’s a very lonely place.
