The blink 182 general discussion topic

[Electrical Substation]

5 minutes ago, Just Good Chats said:

Yes, interesting how, based on perspective,

it can either sound like a very serious and dark, mature record (minus the B-side joke songs and “Happy Holidays”)

or also a very fast, sugar-coated pop thing

To me, it’s just a great, solid, mature record especially with how massive of a song “Anthem Part 2” is to start it all off

They did intend to make it really dark, but as we know, they were asked to add a few happier songs in there to mellow it out (“First Date,” “The Rock Show”)

 

 

if you listen to Mark singing that part in the second verse you can feel how into it he is, how dark it feels, and how much he’s taken by it.

You can picture him in the studio right there, in a quiet room, just fully letting it all out. Hearing it isolated gives me chills

 

 

 

Mature? lol sure Jan 

[dave900]

12 hours ago, boxelder said:

Has anyone else ever had a soft spot for this song? It’s such a sweet puppy love kind of type of song. 

 

One of my favorite songs off that record. Everything sounds so god damned good on that album, guitars, bass, vocals. I love this song!

[dave900]

Whenever I like a girl my friend will sometimes joke around with me and say " She makes me feel like it's raining outside". haha

I saw some video, maybe it was like on Instagram or something where it was Vegeta sitting down in the rain and they had this song playing in the background. Shit goes even harder with a graphic like that.

[Elisa]

7 hours ago, dave900 said:

One of my favorite songs off that record. Everything sounds so god damned good on that album, guitars, bass, vocals. I love this song!

don't forget the drums, toypaj is one of the best sounding albums ever though. everything sounds so crisp and crystal clear. 

[Just Good Chats]

On 2/8/2026 at 7:25 AM, fElon said:

I just scored a signed enema of the state CD. Apparently his mom had a brain tumor and he needed the money for the medical bills. I felt bad. Motivated seller.

Very rare though. Signatures are also dated to 1999. It always better to have a it signed with signatures from around the time it came out. 

 

 

all that i take from this picture is how great u still look

 

[Just Good Chats]

i always tought this was a real great song

but never considered it shoud of been part of the album as a regular song

but hearing it today im thinking, mhmm this could have been there 

i wonder if they felt it may have been a little too close to that shut up song in what it does

[Just Good Chats]

because of that dont tell me song

i just peaked at the whole take off album...

what an album! omg!

[Champ182]

On 3/27/2026 at 12:54 PM, boxelder said:

Frequently I found TOYPAJ to be a bland, safe emotionally stunted retread. But increasingly I’ve really appreciated the musicality and small subtleties. For a long time I felt like the weird focus on high school was to its detriment. I still feel like Tom was forcing himself to write about that time period for a lot of reasons — retreating psychologically from fame to a simpler time, trying to connect back to when he fell in love with punk as he was falling out of it, feeling commercially expected to.

but overall, I’ve oddly come to respect it. There’s something cute about story of a lonely guy, something pure hearted. Even if does feel a little incel adjacent lmao

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.

[thongrider]

To me there's something extremely lame about the "dark" music happening at the time. Especially compared to the boybands. I feel like a lot of the allegedly dark music at the time that would've fit a lot better as boyband music to me. 2001 was just a terrible time for rock music imo. With Enema everything felt so light and upbeat and poppy in a natural sounding way. But just a year later we would get stuff like New Found Glory and Linkin Park and sum 41 at times that really mixed hyper commercial and often brilliantly written pop songs with super heavy riffs which was a combo that never sat well with me and I think toypaj leaned more into that that Enema or even what blink did after toypaj.

[Just Good Chats]

41 minutes ago, thongrider said:

To me there's something extremely lame about the "dark" music happening at the time. Especially compared to the boybands. I feel like a lot of the allegedly dark music at the time that would've fit a lot better as boyband music to me. 2001 was just a terrible time for rock music imo. With Enema everything felt so light and upbeat and poppy in a natural sounding way. But just a year later we would get stuff like New Found Glory and Linkin Park and sum 41 at times that really mixed hyper commercial and often brilliantly written pop songs with super heavy riffs which was a combo that never sat well with me and I think toypaj leaned more into that that Enema or even what blink did after toypaj.

i see how u feel about this, but it has me curious

what do you wish or think blink should have made as a record in 2001

that would of been more in line with what u would have prefered

and do u think they could have done it?

do u think their mindset and creative well would have the idea needed for it to happen?

what they realy had in mind was that take off stuff

[thongrider]

13 minutes ago, Just Good Chats said:

i see how u feel about this, but it has me curious

what do you wish or think blink should have made as a record in 2001

that would of been more in line with what u would have prefered

and do u think they could have done it?

do u think their mindset and creative well would have the idea needed for it to happen?

what they realy had in mind was that take off stuff

Hard to say. Maybe I wouldn't have gotten into it if they didn't sound like that.

[Electrical Substation]

On 3/29/2026 at 12:59 PM, Just Good Chats said:

i always tought this was a real great song

but never considered it shoud of been part of the album as a regular song

but hearing it today im thinking, mhmm this could have been there 

i wonder if they felt it may have been a little too close to that shut up song in what it does

It is a better song than several of the songs on the back half of the album. Shut Up and Please Take Me Home specifically. 

[Electrical Substation]

3 hours ago, Just Good Chats said:

i see how u feel about this, but it has me curious

what do you wish or think blink should have made as a record in 2001

that would of been more in line with what u would have prefered

and do u think they could have done it?

do u think their mindset and creative well would have the idea needed for it to happen?

what they realy had in mind was that take off stuff

He wishes they would have done Cheshire Cat Pt 2 

[thongrider]

7 minutes ago, Diddy Faplord said:

He wishes they would have done Cheshire Cat Pt 2 

I consider Enema Cheshire Cat part 2!

[Dook]

4 hours ago, thongrider said:

To me there's something extremely lame about the "dark" music happening at the time. Especially compared to the boybands. I feel like a lot of the allegedly dark music at the time that would've fit a lot better as boyband music to me. 2001 was just a terrible time for rock music imo. With Enema everything felt so light and upbeat and poppy in a natural sounding way. But just a year later we would get stuff like New Found Glory and Linkin Park and sum 41 at times that really mixed hyper commercial and often brilliantly written pop songs with super heavy riffs which was a combo that never sat well with me and I think toypaj leaned more into that that Enema or even what blink did after toypaj.

Pretty spot on description of that era. I actually didn't mind it because I was going through those hormonal phases where Linkin Park was "speaking to me" even though my life was perfectly fine. That edgy side was something "cool" even if looking back it was just a metallic coating placed on that era for whatever reason. I don't think TOYPAJ ever felt that way though to me. It definitely did with Sum 41 and Linkin Park though. 

[Elisa]

15 hours ago, thongrider said:

To me there's something extremely lame about the "dark" music happening at the time. Especially compared to the boybands. I feel like a lot of the allegedly dark music at the time that would've fit a lot better as boyband music to me. 2001 was just a terrible time for rock music imo. With Enema everything felt so light and upbeat and poppy in a natural sounding way. But just a year later we would get stuff like New Found Glory and Linkin Park and sum 41 at times that really mixed hyper commercial and often brilliantly written pop songs with super heavy riffs which was a combo that never sat well with me and I think toypaj leaned more into that that Enema or even what blink did after toypaj.

I think a big part of that shift comes from the rise of nu-metal around that time. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and especially Linkin Park brought a much heavier, more aggressive sound into the mainstream. For a younger or more casual audience like I was back then that kind of heaviness wasn’t something we were really used to hearing on the radio or MTV.
And because of that, I feel like even adjacent genres like pop punk started absorbing some of that sound.
I agree that Sum 41 or New Found Glory mixed boyband kind of melodies with heavier guitars and that contrast can definitely feel a bit strange if you’re expecting something more straightforward like EOTS, which had a more natural pop sound imo. But at the same time though I don’t necessarily see it as a negative thing.
To me it’s more like a moment in time where different scenes were bleeding into each other. Rock was trying to stay commercially relevant while heavier music was breaking into the mainstream, so we got this hybrid style that doesn’t always feel cohesive and hasn’t aged very well but is actually pretty interesting in hindsight.

I still don’t see TOYPAJ pandering to that trend though. 

[thongrider]

44 minutes ago, Elisa said:

I think a big part of that shift comes from the rise of nu-metal around that time. Bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and especially Linkin Park brought a much heavier, more aggressive sound into the mainstream. For a younger or more casual audience like I was back then that kind of heaviness wasn’t something we were really used to hearing on the radio or MTV.
And because of that, I feel like even adjacent genres like pop punk started absorbing some of that sound.
I agree that Sum 41 or New Found Glory mixed boyband kind of melodies with heavier guitars and that contrast can definitely feel a bit strange if you’re expecting something more straightforward like EOTS, which had a more natural pop sound imo. But at the same time though I don’t necessarily see it as a negative thing.
To me it’s more like a moment in time where different scenes were bleeding into each other. Rock was trying to stay commercially relevant while heavier music was breaking into the mainstream, so we got this hybrid style that doesn’t always feel cohesive and hasn’t aged very well but is actually pretty interesting in hindsight.

I still don’t see TOYPAJ pandering to that trend though. 

At the time i felt like toypaj was the album that could stand up to all the other stuff, but in retrospect I feel like it sort of caters to it compared to Enema. The Rock Show and First Date as singles definitely didnt though, but stktk maybe.

[Elisa]

46 minutes ago, thongrider said:

At the time i felt like toypaj was the album that could stand up to all the other stuff, but in retrospect I feel like it sort of caters to it compared to Enema. The Rock Show and First Date as singles definitely didnt though, but stktk maybe.

I’m not too sure about that. Mark and Tom keep saying that it was a dark/heavier album, but I just don’t see it that way if you compare it to what was considered dark at the time (NIN, Deftones etc). To me they only went darker in 2003. 

[_Kyle_]

I have no idea why they considered TOYPAJ to be that much heavier or darker. even STFTK isn't as "dark" as Adam's Song. I have to assume guys like Rick DeVoe were telling them their songs were not as fun as WMAA and ATST. I guess Anthem Pt 2 is actually angsty compared to their earlier stuff.  

Also compared to the likes of Disturbed, KoRn, M Manson, etc they were on the brighter side of rock during that time. 

 

[Elisa]

28 minutes ago, _Kyle_ said:

I have no idea why they considered TOYPAJ to be that much heavier or darker. even STFTK isn't as "dark" as Adam's Song. I have to assume guys like Rick DeVoe were telling them their songs were not as fun as WMAA and ATST. I guess Anthem Pt 2 is actually angsty compared to their earlier stuff.  

Also compared to the likes of Disturbed, KoRn, M Manson, etc they were on the brighter side of rock during that time. 

 

Maybe all this time when they said darker they just meant darker for Blink, not dark for the era. 
Although to be honest I had never really understood it that way before based on how they have always talked about it, because it always sounded like they meant something more than that lol

But I still believe it feels a bit overstated when they talk about it now. Especially in hindsight, it doesn’t really come across as a genuinely dark era for the band.