Twenty years ago I saw this music video in my friend Brendan’s basement and I don’t think I’ve matured a day since. It was the coolest, funniest, most outrageous music video I had ever seen and I fell in love with these three man children in an instant. Read this lyric and you’ll understand why it struck such a nerve on the little ten year old puppy Pug:
Then later on, on the drive home
I called her mom from a pay phone
I said I was the cops
And your husband’s in jail
The state looks down on sodomy
I would get that as my next tattoo if I hadn’t already sworn off tattoos after my first. But that’s a different story for a different time, cuz we’re talking coming of age while swearing you’ll never grow up now.
The band took over the world shortly thereafter, and I spent the next three awkward years of my life trying to become a punk rocker like the trio who were not only the biggest band of the summer of 99, they also appeared in the funniest scene of American Pie that very well may have given this Pug his first red rocket.
I’m not exactly versed in how to review an album, so I’m not really going to try to get too deep on song subject and musical compisition, but I can assure you that every single song on this album is a banger. I’ll allow New York Magazine’s Nitsub Abe to speak for me here when he (or she? Not familiar with the name…) states:
“Green grass, sun, swimming pools, teen boys obsessed with and mildly terrified by sex, jokes about having sex with things that are not other humans, and a healthy side of toilet-oriented gags. This was middle-class teenage life as one great shiny kindergarten, only with alcohol, online pornography, and secondary sexual characteristics. […] Blink-182 had puppyish enthusiasm, hearts on sleeves, bestiality jokes, much whining about girls, and hooks that sounded like someone doing cannonballs in a backyard pool in August.” Well said, xi. Well said.
I think the only thing that holds this album back from being talked about as the best album of the 90s is it’s immature approach to teenage angst, but my humble opinion is fuck you that’s what teenage years are about. Mixed between songs about breaking up, partying, going off to college and a fear of aliens (we miss you Tom) is an honest song about the desperate feelings of teenage suicide so all critics can suck it.
If you’re not going to hear me on it being the most important album of the 90s musically, I think I can win any argument that it has the best album cover from the decade. Not only is it comically provocative, it fits the subject matter contained on the CD you probably had to get your grandpa to buy for you because he didn’t understand what the Parental Advisory label meant. The model, Janine Lindemulder, was supposedly chosen because the band wanted to have a shoot with a porn star.
(I found the copy my grandpa bought me. Have listened to it 2 full times through in the car today cruising around with the t-tops out. Yes, you read the correct. My car has t-tops.)
Idk if anyone really cares this album turns twenty today, and I’ve not much more to say about it beyond telling you that I’m going to get rip roaring drunk and listen to it a few more times tonight and get nostolgic of happier times, when my biggest worries were the Cubs winning the World Series, calling into TRL to vote for Blink 182 songs, and trying to convince my parents to get me a go kart. Hope you take a listen with me.
-Nostolgia Pug
Pps. A link to blink 182 on loveline at their peak. Worth a listen if you’ve got 90 mins to kill and want a laugh
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/g-i-o-get-it-on/id383038709?i=1000407023806
White Trash Day Dreams 