Day 24: Blink-182 – Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
Album cover courtesy of MCA Records
I ordered a nice pair of headphones to break my recent budget headphone streak, so I didn’t want to choose any Very Serious Album today in case I like it so much that I’ll want to listen to it again when the better headphones arrive. If the album title contains a masturbation joke, it’s probably safe to assume it isn’t that serious. Also, I had a dream a few nights ago where it was almost midnight and I’d forgotten to do my daily album, so I furiously had to write about Blink-182.
I haven’t really listened to Blink-182 since I was a kid. They’re associated in my head with the lads-lads-lads toilet humour that seemed to prevail at the time, watching Jackass and listening to Bloodhound Gang and whatnot. Sometimes I wonder if the kids these days know how far we’ve come in just a few decades – back in my day, the peak of entertainment was watching some guy called Skidmarks Don put a staple through his foreskin. I’d like to say I was elegantly above enjoying it even as a child, unfortunately I was not.
Released in 2001, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket came after Blink-182’s hit album Enema of the State. The singles from that album, like "What's My Age Again?", "All the Small Things", and "Adam's Song", shot the band into stratospheric fame at the time. The following record feels a bit less lavatorial than its predecessor, which is understandable, as they went from playing at clubs to having an entire industrial machinery built around their success. The fact that it’s a bit more grown up is a good thing, though – the album isn’t as poorly aged as it could have been.
Much of it is still about teenage experience and a lack of maturity, but at least in a slightly self-aware way. At the time, Mark Hoppus said “If you gave a 14-year-old kid a microphone and a bunch of people to say something in front of, what would he say? That’s us. Although I’m 27.”
Even though the songs are about being 17, having teenage angst and your parents getting divorced, I can still listen to it in my 30s without cringing. I guess that’s because the guys making the songs were closer to 30 than 17. Songs like “Anthem Part Two” and “Roller Coaster” are still pretty good. I’m not sure much of how much me enjoying this is coloured by the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and actually remembering listening to this 20+ years ago, but still. It’s a very reasonable 6/10.