The Singles Jukebox

Pop, to two decimal places.

Blink-182 – Blame It On My Youth

Take a ride to my old neighborhood…


[Video]
[4.57]

Taylor Alatorre: “What’s My Age Again,” the song anchored by its immortal line “nobody likes you when you’re 23,” was written by Mark Hoppus in 1999. He was 27 at the time. Any halfway informed fan knows this, so what is the lyric “lost since 1999” meant to be doing in a song that’s centered on the formative years of youth? Yeah, extended adolescence is the band’s great subject (contra Christgau), but that’s not what this one is about; instead it doubles as a biographical sketch and a self-tribute to the band as they’ve existed in the public eye for the past two decades. On both counts it’s a failure. The frontline presence of Chicago boy Matt Skiba and ghostly absence of Delonge (both of whom actually were 23 in 1999) get in the way of any unified Blink narrative, which isn’t to say they shouldn’t try — their best songs are pastiches of experiences and/or blatant teensploitation, after all. But the decision to write this origin story as a specifically “punk rock” one renders any inauthenticities particularly noticeable. They present themselves as storm-tossed naïfs whose paths were determined by forces outside their control, but by 1999 the band was open about their pop ambitions and each member already had a side hustle going on. “Raised on a rerun” and an odd reference to “The Safety Dance” get closer to the the junk culture roots of Blink’s success, but “raised on the Ritalin” drags them down to mid-2000’s Green Day glurge. And if this all seems like needless lyrical nitpicking, it’s mainly because I can’t come up with the right words to describe how pathetically and sheepishly the guitars are mixed on the chorus. If they had just taken the “endless summer” bit at the end and repeated it over the course of three minutes, it would’ve been both truer to Blink’s SoCal lineage and worlds easier to listen to.
[2]

Ryo Miyauchi: Blink no longer feel at home with the very pop-punk format that generations of snot-nosed bands have ran with since they’ve “been lost since 1999,” and they’ll be the first to admit how they appear so stiff playing along to that style of their youth. Yet they don’t really do much with that awkwardness or potential secondhand embarrassment from trying on old clothes, and instead chug along in an audible shrug.
[5]

Katherine St Asaph: I knew Blink-182 weren’t going to sound like snotty kids after — jesus christ, two decades. But I was hoping they’d sound less like karaoke night at a mid-career accountants’ retreat, at the point in the evening where everyone’s exhausted and would just go home except three songs are still queued up.
[2]

Tim de Reuse: 2009 me would have loved everything about this: the hyperactive breakbeats, the impeccable pop-punk harmonies, the background constantly twitching from one ostentatious effect to another. 2019 me doesn’t have so much of a sweet tooth, but I can still appreciate the goal: to annihilate all peace and quiet in favor of three minutes of unpretentious, primary-colored sensory stimulation. There are many worse reasons to write a song.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Ruminative tunefulness suits these pranksters more than I expected. Leavening the nostalgia is how the chorus sounds like “blame it on you,” a sentiment which, of course, is the essence of nostalgia. 
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: “Blame It On My Youth” deviates from its recycled “Rock Show” melody after a single line, which is wise, but it doesn’t have much of an idea of where to go instead: transforming into +44 in sound as well as in personnel offers little in the way of inspiration. “Blame It On My Youth” does have a title that suggests anxieties about ageing — or a refusal of the same — that the song doesn’t pursue. Instead, it falls back upon a crutch to which this band has often been susceptible: mistaking studio intrusion as growth. A stuttered chorus in particular drains the anthemic energy Hoppus and Barker — alongside alkaline Tom DeLonge substitute Matt Skiba — seem capable of stirring without even trying. But even though they still sound like they mean it, each lurching moment seems like a suddenly ungainly attempt to inhabit a younger man’s dexterity.
[4]

Micha Cavaseno: Recognizing an inability to become an adult is essentially the crux of Mark Hoppus, a guy who now rapidly faces becoming the third wheel in a band publically despite being such a heavy fixture in the songs that made them so massive. He is sadly not the burnout paranoiac whose shredded voice once resembled half of the current rock and rap charts, nor is he the dork muso drummer. He’s just a guy who writes songs and tries to be charming about the fact that he recognizes that nobody can really be an adult. Not even if you put on suits, get a house, start investing in a CD for your kid going to college. No, right around the corner is still that infuriating fear that you never grew up, you just aged and the guy’s nailed that for decades even outside of Blink. (If people can say Angels & Airwaves was good, I’m a +44 truther). Sadly the band around him is like many bands of their age, burying themselves in studio trickery they don’t quite understand, which in turn makes them sound like a Lesser Good Charlotte instead of themselves. But at the core, who still manages to nail what makes this band this band? Hoppus.
[5]

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