![]() Though not as commercially successful as its previous singles, “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things”, for my money, “Adam’s Song” is the album’s standout track and probably the best song Blink-182 ever recorded. ![]() Enema of the State is, quite simply, a peerless and quintessential album that will echo through pop culture for decades. There’s probably no better summation of pop punk than “bouquet of clumsy words, a simple melody” from the chorus of “Going Away to College”. It showed kids across America and the world that well-written, heartfelt music wasn’t the sole domain of adulthood, that maturity wasn’t a necessary threshold to make music that mattered, because the feelings of young people were just as profound and interesting as adult feelings, even if expressed in no small part via dick jokes. And let’s not forget the general panic-inducing dread in the face of the broken world we’ve inherited (“you don’t belong / you left the kids to carry on / you planned their fall” from “Anthem”). There’s the fear that growing up will kill our joy (“with many years ahead to fall in line / why would you wish that on me? / I never want to act my age” from “What’s My Age Again?”) and the anxiety about growing apart from childhood sweethearts after high school (“I skipped my lecture to watch the girls play soccer / is my picture still hanging in her locker?” from “Going Away to College”). Ian Cohen of Pitchfork listed it with The Offspring’s Smash and Green Day’s Dookie among “ records that served as beginner’s manuals and inspired musicians in great numbers to buy their first guitar”, and it’s not hard to see why.Įnema of the State was an album about the lives and concerns of teenagers and young adults. “Would there even be popular rock music anymore if not for Enema of the State” is a real thought I’ve had on more than one occasion, and I’m not even the world’s biggest Enema of the State guy, it’s just true. “Adam’s Song” was the third and final single from Blink-182’s Enema of the State (1999), an album whose shadow looms so large over the development of rock music this century that I’m hesitant to describe its influence in case I sound like a mad person. Several successful singles from the turn of the century played a big part in that reaction: “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World, “Perfect” by Simple Plan, and the first and most devastating shot, “Adam’s Song” by Blink-182, one of the most perfect songs ever written. Though mostly not millennials themselves (MCR’s Gerard Way is only five years younger than Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong), their fanbases are, and these bands were at the vanguard of millennial pop culture’s reaction to the excessive and counterproductive irony of much Gen X art, a reaction that came to include Green Day themselves with American Idiot (2004). Partially that’s a product of the inherent irony of pop punk as a genre – the tension of sad lyrics over upbeat music – and partially it’s a product of the pervasiveness of irony in Gen X pop culture at large, from Kurt Cobain deadpanning positivity slogans to the relentless cynicism of Seinfeld, which is one reason the balance shifted heavily (but never completely) towards sincerity as this early wave of pop punk bands were succeeded by bands like My Chemical Romance, Paramore and Fall Out Boy in the noughties. “ Basket Case” is a typical example: it’s not that it isn’t upfront about its subject matter – the sense of disorientation and purposelessness that is most definitive of Gen X alternative rock – but it’s delivered with a kind of self-deprecating, tongue-in-cheek, throwaway attitude that’s very hard to describe and very uniquely pop punk. Pop punk has always had a deep and abiding commitment to sincerity, but the genre’s early breakouts, especially Green Day, generally maintained a weird ironic distance from their feelings even as they exorcised them. It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time it was quite a thing for a pop punk band to write a downbeat song about depression. Previously, My Chemical Romance as armour in a world full of misery and cruelty. This article is part of the In Defense of the Genre series.
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