On “Dammit,” an early single about a trying breakup, the chorus goes, “I guess this is growing up.” Hoppus sounds devastated each time he sings the line. Blink-182’s snickering nihilism had legs. “Enema of the State” eventually sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide, a success by any measure. Life was about gags, and doing whatever you felt like doing-or at least that was the performance. A year earlier, the band had titled a tour “PooPoo PeePee.” The notion of embracing adulthood, even begrudgingly-of putting aside childish things, of committing to the sort of life that places a person in orbit of something other than himself, of pumping the brakes just a little on the dick jokes-simply did not register or have currency. Blink-182 was brazenly unconcerned with seeming churlish or wayward. I’d dare suggest that the band even helped engineer (or at least further normalize) the practice of rejecting traditional beacons of manhood. In 1999, the three members of Blink-182-the singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge, the singer and guitarist Mark Hoppus, and the drummer Travis Barker-were in their mid-twenties, and deep into the kind of extended adolescence now presumed of young, privileged American men. She is suggestively stretching a rubber glove over her right hand. The cover features a young lady (Janine Lindemulder, then a star of pornographic videos) wearing blue eyeshadow and a red brassiere, squeezed into a nurse’s costume. It is as apolitical and un-self-serious as its title suggests. “Enema of the State” has since become one of the genre’s most canonical documents (though it owes its predecessors everything) and also one of its most adored. But by the time Blink-182 released its third record, “Enema of the State,” in 1999, pop-punk was axiomatically understood as a sovereign entity, a subgenre that-unlike punk, which thrived on subverting notions of palatability-was deliberately engineered for mass pleasure. Punk purists were scandalized by Green Day’s leap, in 1994, from the independent Lookout! Records to Reprise, which is owned by the Warner Music Group, one of the “Big Three” recording conglomerates. (Kelefa Sanneh reviewed the album in the July 25th issue of the magazine.) This month, the band will play a string of shows in and around New York, including Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, and the Nikon at Jones Beach Theatre, in Wantagh. and in the U.S., where it unseated Drake. When the band released its seventh record, “California,” in July, it débuted atop the pop charts both in the U.K. To that end, one of pop-punk’s most beloved practitioners, Blink-182-a trio born, in 1992, from the skate parks of Southern California-is enjoying a renewed popularity. While a handful of new bands are making vital-seeming pop-punk records, the genre is not commercially ascendant rather, it seems to have invaded young hearts and minds as an artifact. ![]() Which means the melodic pop-punk of yesteryear is having an odd return, if not quite a proper renaissance. It seems deeply bogus to call that adoration “nostalgia,” as many of the folks now knotting flannel shirts around their midriffs and dipping their pigtails into jars of Manic Panic weren’t even born when, say, the Offspring released “Smash”-but it is earnest, and it is widespread. And no era is presently being gazed upon with more pie-eyed approbation than the waning years of the twentieth century. Photograph by Brian Gove / WireImage / GettyĪlthough pop-punk was not invented in the late nineteen-nineties-in the preceding decades, bands like Bad Religion, Agent Orange, Social Distortion, Hüsker Dü, Green Day, and the Descendents did the strange work of injecting either melody or jocularity, or both, into punk’s staunchness-few musical genres now feel as emblematic of that era. ![]() A reconfigured version of the nineties band Blink-182-featuring Matt Skiba (standing in for Tom DeLonge), Mark Hoppus, and Travis Barker-is enjoying renewed popularity among a younger generation of fans.
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