No wonder the song became the blueprint for modern acts like Mom Jeans or Modern Baseball. It’s most certainly a product of the ’90s, but listening to the track in 2022, there’s something timelessly authentic about it. “M+M’s,” one of the album’s singles, captures the balance of rawness and irreverence that would go on to make the act so influential. And, honestly, thank god for that, because the record now stands as a perfect encapsulation of the band before they became a hit machine. Instead, the California trio sounded just as scrappy and rough around the edges as they did on their demo tape Buddha. It’s hard growing up it’s even harder to admit it when you’re finally there.īlink-182’s debut studio album Cheshire Cat isn’t exactly the grand, polished, and refined introduction that, say, The Blue Album was for Weezer. Three decades on, many of Blink’s biggest fans are stumbling into their own versions of adulthood and realizing the appeal of extended adolescence. The boys of Blink-182 never seemed to care much about their place in music history, their minds preoccupied with botched relationships and brainstorming sexual puns for their next album title. Talk to those fans today, and they’ll recall with misty eyes the roller rink they were at when they first heard “What’s My Age Again?” or the hours they spent plunking out the opening riff of “Dammit” on guitar. But Blink beat the odds and found a way to make it cool, largely by appealing to a younger generation of music fans who simply didn’t know any better. It’s a story that’s all too familiar these days and one that most people would even find sort of pathetic. Gleefully irreverent and self-consciously juvenile, that record was most people’s introduction to Blink-182, a Southern Californian pop-punk band whose members refused to act their own age.Īt the prime of their career, Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge, and Travis Barker - who replaced original drummer Scott Raynor in 1998 - were twentysomethings stuck in a strange dream of high school that never quite ended. If you’re a sociologist searching for Ground Zero - that time when the 20s shifted from a life stage of “emerging adulthood” to one of “prolonged adolescence” - an album called Enema of the State isn’t the worst place to start. Maybe a new generation of so-called “millennials” is finally starting to understand a line they heard in a song back in 1999: “Nobody likes you when you’re 23.” The subtext to that question is another question: “Why are people in their 20s finding it so hard to grow up?” The answers range from changing social mores to an uncertain job market, but maybe it’s even simpler than that. “What is it about 20-somethings?” asks the title of a New York Times Magazine article published in 2010. We’re revisiting it in celebration of Blink-182’s upcoming reunion tour and new music. This feature originally ran in February 2015.
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