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TOYPAJ 20th Anniversary


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3 hours ago, Ghent said:

It’s funny looking back because I vividly remember driving around in high school repeatedly playing First Date like it was the most amazing piece of relatable music ever released. That and Please Take Me Home.

I still like the latter, but Tom ruined First Date for me. I’d probably be nostalgic about it to this day if he hadn’t absolutely shit on it live after the reunion. It ruined it for me. When the guy who wrote it can’t take it seriously over time, it kills the song 

I actually agree with you there, I used to like First Date quite a bit but his animosity towards it definitely took the shine off. 

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I was 12 in 2001 and that summer I really got into blink. To me TOYPAJ is forever tied to a very specific careless and happy summer, which I mostly associate with days spent in the swimming pool at my friend's house, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and MTV/TRL.
Hearing the opening notes to “Anthem pt 2” or the nananas in Online Songs instantly takes me back into a time of my life where everything seemed to be perfect and even though this isn't my favourite blink album, when I listen to it, it always brings me back to that optimistic feeling of basking in the sun and feeling a sense of self-assuredness.

The first guitar solo I learned to play on my guitar was the guitar solo in Give Me One Good Reason.

I didn't go to any shows because I was still too young, but I will always associate the album and those songs to a total sense of happiness.

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8 hours ago, Ghent said:

It’s funny looking back because I vividly remember driving around in high school repeatedly playing First Date like it was the most amazing piece of relatable music ever released. That and Please Take Me Home.

I still like the latter, but Tom ruined First Date for me. I’d probably be nostalgic about it to this day if he hadn’t absolutely shit on it live after the reunion. It ruined it for me. When the guy who wrote it can’t take it seriously over time, it kills the song 

Eh first date always sucked. It was the video that made it awesome. Please take me home is a yawn fest too. I’d easily get rid of both of those songs. Don’t tell me it’s over and Time to break up we’re both far superior songs. Let’s never forget those either guys!

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4 hours ago, Johnny Two Bags said:

Eh first date always sucked. It was the video that made it awesome. Please take me home is a yawn fest too. I’d easily get rid of both of those songs. Don’t tell me it’s over and Time to break up we’re both far superior songs. Let’s never forget those either guys!

Time To Break Up is great but DTMTIO might be one of the worst Tom blink songs ever written. It's absolute wank. 

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I remember my Auntie buying me Enema and I went back to the shop to swap it for toypaj because I knew the rock show and first date. Absolutely fell head over heels and then went back to get enema and the rest is history 

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54 minutes ago, Negen said:

You are full of it!

The chorus is literally Tom barking every syllable, it has a terrible riff, and has lyrics that may as well be "Boys like sports, girls like shopping, duuuuuuurrrrrpppp" 

The "Hold on" pre chorus harmony is gorgeous but the rest of the song is cringey and too typical pop punk, even for blink. 

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6 minutes ago, Kay said:

The chorus is literally Tom barking every syllable, it has a terrible riff, and has lyrics that may as well be "Boys like sports, girls like shopping, duuuuuuurrrrrpppp" 

The "Hold on" pre chorus harmony is gorgeous but the rest of the song is cringey and too typical pop punk, even for blink. 

The song is great.

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6 hours ago, Johnny Two Bags said:

Eh first date always sucked. It was the video that made it awesome. Please take me home is a yawn fest too. I’d easily get rid of both of those songs. Don’t tell me it’s over and Time to break up we’re both far superior songs. Let’s never forget those either guys!

Time to break up is easily a top ten blink song for me. It sucks donkey balls that it's not on any streaming platform

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spring 2001 was my final semester of college.

i heard about jacket when someone told me that blink had a new video on MTV where they gave out a bunch of money and smashed stuff. i thought, yea, that sounds like them. i had really liked "man overboard" so i thought this sounded promising. i bought the album the day it came out, but didn't listen to it very much. it was the kind of CD i just left in my car. today i prefer it to enema. i remember going on audiogalaxy (a post-napster p2p service) that summer to get the bonus tracks from the import versions. i liked "what went wrong" very much.

for some context, at the time, the biggest albums of the year for me were...

- alkaline trio from here to infirmary
weezer green
dashboard confessional the places you have come to fear the most 
-
saves the day stay what you are
- jimmy eat world bleed american

i was most eager for jimmy's album as the demos had leaked at the start of the year (weezer, alk3 and dashboard all leaked well in advance too, those were the days). probably, if i were honest, the year belongs to bleed american.

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I had started listening to blink a year or so before this album came out, but this was the first album of theirs that I bought. I went to the store with my dad and he didn't want to let me buy it because of the parental advisory, but I wore him down and he got it for me. I adored every track and soon bought the rest of their albums.

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On 4/24/2021 at 7:13 AM, Ghent said:

It’s funny looking back because I vividly remember driving around in high school repeatedly playing First Date like it was the most amazing piece of relatable music ever released. That and Please Take Me Home.

I still like the latter, but Tom ruined First Date for me. I’d probably be nostalgic about it to this day if he hadn’t absolutely shit on it live after the reunion. It ruined it for me. When the guy who wrote it can’t take it seriously over time, it kills the song 

I remember loving "The Rock Show" (as well as other songs I had heard) and being disappointed in "First Date" when it was released on mtv. It grew on me when I got the album though, but I think Tom ruined it a bit for me too. 

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i was definitely too young at the time to experience and enjoy this period of the band, but i remember hearing first date in the movie clockstoppers in 02. i was already a fan of ATST from radio so whenever file-sharing services really took off the next year, i downloaded a few blink songs. it still took about five more years to fully immerse myself in the band, but for whatever reason, TOYPAJ was always at the bottom for me.

my initial love for the band was colored by tom’s 05 exit, so i couldn’t help but view TOYPAJ through the lens of what came after. i also was very into untitled and felt TOYPAJ was an unnecessary retread of EOTS... fun but dumb, too radio-friendly, etc. with time i was able to re-approach it, which has only happened in the last few years. it’s an energetic, classic pop punk album, with tons of classic blink moments... the perfection of their sound. the production is unreal too... it sounds better than any other blink album, which is full credit to jerry finn and his engineers. mark has some of his best ever songwriting, while tom in retrospect seems to be struggling with success/being a major label musician/his role. it’s obvious he was feeling stifled and chose to only write songs from an adolescent perspective, because he felt that was what was expected of him, by the public, label, managers, etc. it’s the root of the bands downfall. but even those songs are fun, full of great riffs and classic moments. the only thing i still don’t like is STFTK, which feels like an unnecessary attempt recapturing the tone of Adam’s song. 

truly envious of those here who got to enjoy it in real time haha. it was definitely the peak of pop punk’s mainstream exposure ... it still feels like a watershed moment, the first “punk”-adjacent LP to go no. 1 in the states IIRC.

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I was 3 when it originally came out, so...

but when I got into it as I was initially exploring blink’s discography, I always felt like Mark and Tom were at their creative peak at the time. EOTS is my favorite blink album by far (and I think as a project it’s superior to TOYPAJ), but there’s something about the songwriting and performances on tracks like Online Songs, Roller Coaster, and Reckless Abandon that sound like lightning in a bottle. Just pure pop punk magic. TOYPAJ is blink’s most commercially immature album in terms of subject matter and tone for sure - but in terms of their growth as artists, it feels like their most mature /pop/ punk effort, if that makes sense. 

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On 4/24/2021 at 5:50 PM, Cheerios4u98 said:

I actually think Tom purposely ruining First Date live is one of the funniest things the band has done post-reunion. Made me laugh every time.

I bring this up a lot but one of my favorite riotfest moments with blink was Tom realizing First Date was next and then Mark saying something mockingly like, "Uh-oh, someone didn't read their email before the show..."

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2 hours ago, vic vinegar said:

I bring this up a lot but one of my favorite riotfest moments with blink was Tom realizing First Date was next and then Mark saying something mockingly like, "Uh-oh, someone didn't read their email before the show..."

I want to say something like that also happened at their BlizzCon show when they randomly played First Date in the middle of their untitled album set. I’d have to find it again but I remember thinking it was funny.

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