BOY FRIENDS

i need to talk to everyone about blink182. 

the like 4 of you or whatever who saw my twitter screed about california don’t need to expect a repeat performance. i’ve (mostly) finished with crying over what a predictable disaster the reunion album was and anyway i wanna talk about something a little bigger.

appropriately, that something bigger starts with “all the small things.” 

but first let me back up. because as the dust settles and youtube is flooded with professionally shot videos of “the new blink’s” live shows, some truths have come into focus.

it may seem obvious to most people, but as terrible as california is, it’s only a capitulation to tendencies that have been latent in blink’s music for a long time. the tunes were catchy from the start, of course, but as has been pointed out by many of their disdainful punk peers, their primary distinction among the legions of pop punk acts of their generation was the unrelentingly saccharine overtones that permeated their otherwise aggressive music. case in point: between their formation and the period before the release of their self-consciously “dark” self-titled album, they wrote and recorded exactly two songs in minor keys, and because one of those songs is “alone” from flyswatter (the demo they recorded live to 4-track in a bedroom while tom was still in high school), probably none but the most die-hard fans have heard more than one. (i’m not counting the faux-metal riffing from the opening of cheshire cat’s “just about done” because it’s played for laughs, although the band’s competence at mimicking that style illuminates some interesting blind alleys along their trajectory. same goes for “mother’s day” off take off.) even factoring in self-titled only adds 2.5 at most, and box car racer, shockingly, adds none.

again, this might not be so extraordinary for a pop rock band who were stating their aims to write “the catchiest music possible” before they were even being distributed by a major label. i mean, i’ve written a lot of songs in my day, and i could probably count on one hand the amount that are in minor keys, or even minor modes.  but not only does that metric hold true across four albums and more than 50 songs, but there is hardly a single accidental (any note that deviates from the white-key major scale) across their entire oeuvre, even including side-projects!* the only instances that come to mind are the guitar solo in “carousel,” which barely counts because it’s just tom moving his melody around the fretboard without adjusting for the key he’s playing in; a single bar during the breakdown of “emo;” a passing note mark plays a couple of times in the bass intro to “josie;” and the metal breakdown at the end of “obvious.”

it’s difficult to explain in non-technical terms how strange this is, even for the very most saccharine of pop acts. the most archetypical pop-rock imaginable - like, i don’t know, early beatles, or toto, or something - still always relied on accidentals for crafting hooks, or even just pivot points for moving between major and minor sections or key switches. or in punk terms, you know that chord progression that appears in almost every green day song? you know, like the chorus to “longview,” or “welcome to paradise,” or “jaded,” or “geek stink breath” &c., not to mention literally every other pop punk band to come out of california or anywhere? this completely stock-and-trade punk gesture has been literally inconceivable to blink182 for their entire career. this is probably why i’ve never been able to understand why people say blink182 sound generic, or are somehow green day copycats - they quite literally sounded like nobody else, and the math backs it up.

it seems like a fine point, but i’m certain that this aspect of blink’s music is key to understanding the band’s identity throughout the best years of their career, and where they’ve landed now. despite being one of the fastest, loudest bands around, from almost the very beginning their sound was unalloyed sweetness, and it’s clear to me now that they were always very conflicted about this fact. they always seemed to concerned with being not punk enough, or not pop enough - parallel to their lyrical content, which concerned itself primarily with their feelings of inadequacy to the challenge of leaving their childhood behind, they were constantly torn between the punk sound that nurtured them and cradled them safely through messy childhoods and the pop success that had the exclusive power to validate their ambitions. 

this tension was the key to the success of their best music, and a huge part of what made them so important to the kids who grew up on them. for sensitive kids who felt their insecurities coalescing into frustration and aggression and yet were horrified at the thought of actually hurting anybody with it, blink was incredibly important as a reliably safe emotional outlet. their self-deprecating attitude also had the advantage of keeping their egos (mostly) in check, which is important, because as soon as they actually started believing in how good they were, it all fell apart. 

see, because we should have known all along that the pop prima donna posturing that makes contemporary blink and angels and airwaves so obnoxious was always a little bit in their souls. one thing no ever seems to want to mention is both mark and tom’s incredibly annoying habit of switching up the vocal melodies to their songs when they play live, often going so far as to rewrite entire choruses. i’m all for spontaneity in live performance, but they both tended to settle on certain variations that would be consistent across performances, and they often completely ruined the song’s hooks, to say nothing of the chaos it would create when the two singers tried to harmonize while this was going on. plus, the variations were usually more monotone than the original melodies, and don’t seem to be for the benefit of their vocal ranges either - in other words, showing off in the worst possible way. mark was a much more common offender in the early days, but now tom has easily taken that trophy from him - practically nothing tom sings is recognizable anymore. 

which is the even more awkward dimension to this unfortunate habit of theirs - the element of competition is clear. this is where we start getting into what has undone the band: that tension between sweetness and riot that propelled the band wasn’t just between them and their aspirations; it was between mark and tom themselves. here’s a bit on my theory that the seeds of the band’s destruction were sown during the take off your pants and jacket sessions.

so blink182 had finally made it, and they finally had their chance to stretch their legs in the studio with a major label budget. (in the band’s telling, their breakthrough enema of the state was recorded to tape in six weeks; studio demos and various live performances while scott raynor was still drumming indicate that those songs had been fully written before entering the studio.) reportedly, mark was ready to do everything more or less the same as last time, only “bigger and better.” tom, who was hoping to stretch out creatively and experiment now that they could afford it, was “bummed out” by this. in the end, they did things mark’s way (should we start calling him “mcmarkney?”), and not to say it didn’t work out in their favor commercially (first #1 punk album, apparently), the rifts forming were audible. while the album contains some of their best work, the songs were starting to become formally a little contrived, some of the verses and middle eights starting to feel more like scaffolding that inspiration. and sonically, very little had changed, other than travis having reached his masturbatory sweet spot with some fantastically complex and catchy drum parts.**

anyway, we all know what happened next. box car racer. mark feels betrayed. nothing’s ever the same. they fight through it hard enough to finish one more (mostly brilliant) album before falling apart acrimoniously. mark and tom finally have the chance to pursue their muses individually. tom gets addicted to painkillers and starts believing himself a god, finally earning the confidence to actually write the same song over and over and over again.*** mark actually manages to have some ideas, and some of them even make it onto the +44 album, although in the end his fear of failure prevents him from committing fully to the initial electronic, experimental concept, and so no one cares.

we’re coming to the point soon, honest. 

because no one caring was the only force strong enough to convince mark to try blink again in the first place - the only cure for the inadequacy he sang about was the success those songs brought him, and he wasn’t really able get up in the morning without it, despite all of the other extracurricular projects he’s taken on in his career. being a sad punk rocker and on top of the world at the same time is the only thing that makes mark feel validated. although when asked about it, what he says is that he wants to continue blink182′s legacy. 

their legacy.

this is where “all the small things” comes in. because now mark has matt skiba playing tom’s parts and singing tom’s hits over prerecorded tracks recorded by tom years ago, because people still want to hear those songs and most of them either weren’t around to hear tom play them or are too young to know any better. which is fine, but it does say interesting things about mark’s idea of blink’s legacy.

now, i’ve spent quite a bit of time with skiba’s work over the last couple of weeks, trying to learn to like alkaline trio enough to feel as sad about matt’s defection to confection as i do about mark’s. apart from one pretty amazing song, AT don’t do a lot for me, although i was able to come to terms with the fact that skiba is a pretty good fit for blink on paper, having built his career on the sort of stylized goth-lite aesthetic that tom made his trademark circa 2003 - i’ve built up enough respect for his repertoire to feel like he deserves a bit better at this stage of his career than being a mannequin.

at least i did feel that way, until i saw blink182 perform “all the small things” on the stage of some kind of good morning america summer music festival. 

at this point i probably haven’t convinced you to watch that video, because we both know it’s bad, but there is one aspect of its badness that i find very significant. it’s not that there’s some stranger up there singing one of tom’s best songs with apparently some mild derision, and it’s not so much that they’re playing to a fucking prerecorded backing track that phones in all the album version’s bells and whistles in the absence of any genuine charm or enthusiasm from the band. seriously, matt skiba’s guitar is coming in through the PA and he does not really need to be playing it, and he knows it.

but the crime is committed during the intro: anyone who knows this song guitar knows, you’ve got the C, then the C over F, and then the palm muted chord - but what’s this? skiba’s not palm muting anything! he’s just resting his left hand on the fret board and scratching!

call me crazy, but i feel as though that’s a sign of genuine contempt. matt skiba has been a professional guitarist for nearly 20 years now, and there’s no way he wouldn’t know that tom is actually playing a chord there if he had listened to the song more than twice. maybe he does know and doesn’t care (which is certainly how he looks when i’m not giving him the benefit of the doubt), but if he doesn’t then mark definitely does, and definitely doesn’t care****. i don’t begrudge mark’s hatred of tom, but such a glaring and lazy oversight as that, no matter how insignificant it seems on the surface, communicates to me contempt for the song’s audience. (then again, the audience now is made of up kids too young to have any kind of relationship with tom and adults too absorbed in sublimating their shame for their younger selves into appreciation for this gross facsimile of them, so who cares.)

and it wouldn’t be such a big deal if that contempt shown by blink mark II didn’t permeate every other aspect of their totally canned shows and this totally canned album they’ve put out. the performances are lifeless, the lyrics are brainless, the structural disjointedness born out of the tension of the take off sessions has been taken to its logical extreme in the bloodlessness that defines blink182 in 2016. i mean, you know all this already; one half of a legendary duo thinks he can do it all on his own, and in the absence of a foil he falls apart. i guess i had hoped to make it past 25 before i got to watch it happen in real time. 

one thing though. mark feldman: fuck you.

it’s kind of funny. the two blink albums before this one centered around the band’s obsession with finally claiming maturity for themselves, rather than struggling to accept it as they had for all of their career up to that point. now this new version of the band is unashamed to admit that they’re trying to reclaim their position at the top of the summertime pop-rock back, as evidenced by their criminally uninspired music video starring every AAA video game protagonist from the past ten years. who once embodied the impulses i longed to express, now represent the impulses i fear the most as i age. well i guess this is growing up.

*it bears mentioning here that, for some reason, as soon as +44 was formed mark all of a sudden was writing almost exclusively in minor keys, as has been largely the case since. still no accidentals, though.

**to be fair, the band also reached the absolute peak of their live potency at this time. travis had found his groove, and tom has never played faster.

***fun fact for tom haters: you know that one riff that’s in every AVA song ever written? tom has been playing it for his whole career.