Champ182

Well said! I think you're probably spot on about some of the reasons why they stuck with some of these topics (it's still funny to hear how often they talked about TOYPAJ as being this "dark" album that brought in a bunch of their punk influences, I think Mark still described it that way in his book). But I also don't necessarily think it was like a teenybopper cosplay sellout thing to attract MTV fans either, which kinda became a go-to diss about the album. To me it feels more like a John Hughes movie or something, obviously made by adults but with the goal of recapturing something about teenage life. I mean nobody criticized The Breakfast Club or Sixteen Candles for being about high school haha. Blink had a gift of expressing the feelings from that exact time in life in a way that felt fun and sad and funny and angry and energetic and immature and deep all at once and made it palatable to the masses. Unlike in movies, you can only pull that off for so long as a musician. I don't begrudge them too much for mining those feelings in TOYPAJ, even if it feels a little silly in some places.

Who the hell knows, I still think his brain wasn't working properly for quite a long time (or he was legitimately abducted by aliens and they replaced him with a lookalike for 18 years)

I was surprised to see him without a hat for the first time in years! Haha he looks a lot better now than he did in his fulltime UFO days:

whoa that's coming right up! I wonder if they're rehearsing now

I was way out of the loop - I thought Green Day was going to perform at halftime, similar to when RHCP popped up during Bruno Mars's halftime show awhile back. When did Green Day play? I never saw them.

I loved Modern Baseball! They don't fit into that All Time Low type of stuff at all.

Yeah I mean he's just some non-famous dude who was replying to a random comment on his instagram about a project he worked on 10 years ago, I can't imagine he had any sort of agenda or thought anybody would ever even see it haha.

that was a different one called the Blinkumentary and it was only about the first reunion I believe

One of my favorite folk artists Madi Diaz just released a full Enema Of The State cover album to raise money for https://defendingourneighbors.org/ and it rules! I had no idea she was a Blink fan so this made my day haha. https://madidiaz.bandcamp.com/album/enema-of-the-garden-state "These recordings started out as a fun light exercise fueled by an eternal love and fandom I have for blink-182 and the record Enema Of The State. I was in the studio in New Jersey peeling back layers and tracking and writing Fatal Optimist, and every morning to warm up in the studio, producer and engineer Andrew Maury would set up some mics and turn on the 4 track and let me just play around by myself. I had been listening to this batch of songs obsessively once again (it’s almost a seasonal occurrence with certain records) on my jogs and I wanted to see if I could just run these songs and let the nostalgia drive my memory for the lyrics and tear through a punky acoustic arrangement. No planning, no overthinking, no analyzing allowed, just ripping into the songs. It was just pure fun pure joy. There was no clear intention of releasing this project until recently. We started thinking about how incredible the name Enema Of The State is for a record. How the title is somehow so hilariously current and politically culturally socially insanely ironic…. How funny/ridiculous it is to cover this record in 2025 when it feels like we really need to flush the system and give our whole government a health check / gut check. And as time has gone on it continues to become more and more apparent that we are at a real boiling point - there is just so much going on at this very moment across America and so much pain with ICE raids and false condemnations of hard working American citizens and Undocumented Immigrants …and maybe just maybe we could use this version of enema of the (garden) state in whatever way we possibly can to raise awareness and money for people in need of defense and aid in their right to live and work and breathe and be and stay on American soil. I may have been born on US soil but my family came from Danish and Peruvian immigrants. So much of The United States of America is populated by people who came from other places. There is so much here we have to love and protect and nurture. So, for all of those reasons, this project is up on bandcamp, and every penny it generates will go to Defending Our Neighbors Fund. This will help give immigrant families, adults, young children, and so many of those in need of advocates, access to resources through this support system. They are providing immediate grants for trusted organizations to deploy legal advice and bond assistance. Thank you so so much for listening. For me, it’s become about so much more than just a nostalgia for teenage rebellion against mom and dad. Fuck ICE. Enema Of The State Forever."

I tried, folks!

Good lord what an annoying conversation! Anyone who ever watched the Cheetah Videos and Album Launch can clearly see they were not in some bottomless pit of depression while writing that album. It's right there on tape. They were being hilarious weirdos and living out their wildest creative dreams in a way they hadn't even attempted before. They were still in a strange part of life in their late 20s/early 30s that I'm sure many of us can actually relate to, when family stuff can get weird, friendships fray, mental illness has a tendency to rear its head, they had babies at home which is incredibly beautiful but also incredibly stressful and anxiety inducing especially combined with the guilt of being away so much, the country was newly at war, the pressure and monotony of "being Blink" was getting to them, etc etc etc. It's ridiculous to think they were "miserable" and down in some dark hole at the time, but it's also ridiculous to think they were happy go lucky millionaires chasing a trend. I happen to think it was a very honest and earnest account of all of those feelings. It's strange to me that diehard Blink fans could think it was all one way or the other after 20 years haha.

Just throwing this Ramones centrist anthem in here wait what

I love One More Time so much. We're in a pretty unique time in music history where a ton of bands who already had their time and then broke up or went on hiatus or whatever have come back years later. That never happened in the past the way it's happening now. Some of them are cash grabs, some are because their kids grew up and they're bored and wanna relive their youth or stave off old age, and very few genuinely recapture the inspiration and energy it takes to be a "real" band. Against all odds, that's where Blink are at right now. I genuinely never ever thought I would see a version of Blink that had all 3 members feeling engaged and creative and trying hard, ever again. In my opinion, that comes through in the music, even if it's impossible for them to actually reach the levels of genius they had when they were way younger and in way different circumstances in life. We were lucky enough to see what these dudes could do at full capacity in their 20s, and now we are getting to see what they can do at full capacity in their 40s and 50s. Of course it's not gonna be exactly the same and they can't fully achieve the symbiosis they did back in the day, but it was totally far-fetched for almost 2 decades that we'd ever get to see it. It's such a gift.

I'm in Omaha, KC was just the closest spot last year and I couldn't make a trip work this year!