Day 2: Blink-182

There were so many choices to pick from today. The obvious one would have been to do a review of Borderlands 2 but I don't think I'm at a point where I can review it right now. I could have gone with a comedy option and wrote a couple paragraphs about Buns or Boogers (because my sense of humor is 10 years old) or I could have done a whole post about the creeping horror of male pattern Baldness that is slowly making it's way around my head. Instead, I found inspiration when I sat down to write and turned on my music player.

Blink-182 is one of those bands that I really like but I don't own any of their CDs. I also wouldn't usually admit that I like them right away but they are just one of those bands that I discovered as a teenager and they just kept appearing at the right time with the right song to capture a certain mood as I grew older. At certain points in my life, I've been reclusive to the point where it was work, go home and just listen to music until I fell asleep. There was always some specific track from Blink that worked it's way into the mix.

"Dammit" was one of the first songs of theirs that I remember hearing and was one of the first songs I downloaded on Napster. Consequently, it was also one of the eight songs I put on my first MP3 player that held a whopping 32 mb of music. It perfectly summed up the feelings of high school and the general malaise that being almost out of school and almost eighteen brings on. "The Rock Show" was what I thought I was looking forward to as I grew older and moved out of my dad's house, first in with my older brother and then with some friends. "Feeling This" was appropriate for the first half of the year lease we took out on this amazing house that became a real party spot. Then, one room mate got pregnant and the other had a rough break up and in between all this stuff, I went through my first real relationship and the horrible fallout from that. So, "I Miss You" became the track to play while wistfully thinking about what could have been. Slowly, I came to grips with reality and started to understand that some people will just use others and then throw them away. "Stockholm Syndrome" was the track that got played over and over.

It's appropriate that three of the most listened to tracks of theirs were from the self-titled album because I think that was the album that they really put a lot of themselves into. I know most people would probably write this band off as cheesy pop-punk, the kind of music people only listen to because they don't know any better or they just have bad taste. Lyrically, though, Blink-182 is like any other good band. Some of their songs are silly, fun party songs but even those tracks are self-aware enough to be sung with the appropriate smirk, as if to say "This is not who we are all the time but this is what you want, so here it is".  They have been around for almost twenty years now and I think they figured out that if they do just enough of whatever people want to hear, they can really do whatever they want and eventually the two things start to merge until their audience is just people who want to hear whatever they want to play.

I guess it was only recently that I took a step back and tried to make a clearer definition of myself but I really couldn't do it by music because this is a band I love, but so is Jurassic 5, Slipknot and Garth Brooks. There's not really anything that is off limits when it comes to me and music but blink-182 was there when I didn't really completely understand how important music is and they just stuck. I really considered changing the topic to Ben Folds Five half way through this article because I still have this feeling that saying I like this band will somehow ruin my social standing. Still, I guess this is one of those things that is just bouncing around in my head and I wanted to just lay it to rest here. Also, I procrastinated and ended up writing this at about 11 pm. I'll probably start earlier tomorrow.