Blink

Sum 41 - Fat Lip - 2

The preponderance of this stuff five or six years after Green Day boggles my mind. The only remotely interesting thing to these ears is that, while it's still recognizably "pop punk," they've somehow managed to strip all of the Ramones/Buzzcocks influence away. If I was being charitable, it sounds sometimes like the kinda punky un punk Cheap Trick grabbed at on occasion. Really it just sounds as if Poison's "Talk Dirty To Me" came out as a 7" on Lookout.

it's punk rock glam metal - stripped of any lingering concessions whatevah "punk rock" was in the first place, and instead of the goony feathered hairspray aesthetic of poison et al, filtered through american fratboy speak.

I could like these bands more if they were slaves to the hook like, say Green Day obviously were. But they're not. Second-rate attitude covering up second-rate songs.

Selling disenfranchisement to the popular kids. I could admire the cynicism if only there WERE some. Just a kind of ironic wink stating "Hey. We know we're not fighting the system. We ARE the system." instead of "Hey. We're not pop. We're alternative. Yes, even though we sound like pop, we aren't. See? We play guitars and have tattoos and piercings. We're not pop, because your parents wouldn't like us. Grab your skateboard and hit the ramps while pumping our shit.".

I should say that authenticity of message doesn't mean anything to me, these bands really MIGHT believe what they're doing but the whole exercise still reeks to me. These songs aren't being written and these bands aren't being signed to major labels in a cultural vacuum. The context of the fact that this ooh-we-hate-society sort of shit being exceedingly popular obviously works against whatever charms these songs might have if an objective listen were possible.

Okay, one might say, let's take out that and try to appreciate it on a purely aesthetic level. Believe me, I've tried, but Blink 182 songs don't have hooks, they really don't. They're not SONGS in any sense of the word.

"All the Small Things" sounds like a computer was programmed to calculate the optimum hook to ensnare people who don't really like music very much. (Of course, then you get the obligatory follow-up that has no hook at all, but is REALLY deep to a 15-year old) "Fat Lip" sounds like a pastiche of all sorts of popular bits designed to connect with every conceivable type of pop fan who might set foot inside a record store. There's nothing wrong with appealing to the lowest common denominator, but that doesn't mean there's a need to find something good in offensive tosh like this.

If you heard Fat Lip on the radio, would you honestly think "Wow! Exciting new band" or would you just assume it was the new single from any one of a dozen generic American groups?

Your objection seems to be that using lyrics like "casualty of society" is bogus, but you're then characterising these kids as having been sold nonconformity and cut off from other presumably more original (or more 'punk') options - if that's not being made a 'casualty of society' then what is. Blink/Sum are fundamentally quite honest bands, I think, not that honesty matters terribly much. No they're not anything other than 'pop', yes their pretence otherwise (actually the pretence of their fans) can be a bit irksome but if there is any kind of tension and conflict in the music then this is where it lives - the rub between wanting to be loud and aggressive and wanting to write/dance to the killer hook, which is the same conflict between individual stress and collective hedonism that characterises being 15 anyway. 'Nonconformity' and 'being individual' tends just to mean 'cutting out the hedonism' i.e. I go off and listen to Morrissey, Jess goes off and listens to Superchunk... I wish I *had* listened to more Blinkish stuff at that age, sometimes.

I'm not so sure how Blink can have 'no hooks' one clause and then be scientifically tooled to produce 'the optimum hook' the next, too.

I don't think these bands are particularly lovely. If my brother was ten years younger I'd buy him the Sum 41 album and give it a sneaky listen, sure. But I think the ott loathing of them is very odd, and I think they're better than a lot of the {real} alternatives.

not that tom needs me to defend him, but i don't think that he personally was looking for anything to like about blink et al, but more to find out why "we" hated them so much. (separation from the hatin horde doesn't necessarily mean you "like" em. but i think we all know mr. ewing is a devils advocate for lost pop causes the world over.) ;)

i have to agree with tom that banality is a really strange word to be throwing around in discussing teen pop. you can use the same tools to dissect a superman comic as a pollock, but eventually - using those criterion - you're going to come up short. in many ways you're setting yourself up to come up short; which - reducto ad whatevah - is what adult type rock critics are doing so they can get their intellectual rocks off in the cheapest way possible. (holla at me, hornby.)

another thing that i think is probably off-putting to those same types that tom describes above that otherwise love power pop is - under the mawkish aw shucks nerboyisms - a really masculine sexuality, which i suppose is what everyone from lester bangs to james taylor (and their fans) found distasteful in grand funk, or whomever. (and as for the indie kids this goes back to the whole "against health and effciency" deal.)

Sum 41 may well be sexual but frankly they hardly look old enough.

we're really just a couple of indie saddos who are trying to reclaim their (nevah had) lost youth of drinkin, shaggin, and general adolescent bacchanalia.

but that's why they = rowr.

* like, the best part about "All The Small Things" was the perilously short distance between Blink and the stars they sent up in the video

tim is indeed otm; which doesnt counteract my earlier statements, mind. i seriously doubt aaf *has* head the buzzies, et al, but he's right in that they have inherited grunge's pop-unpop dichotomy, the contempt for "lesser material." (this paradigm is still in full effect; witness that monkey from creed on "making the video" last night mouthing off about how "this isn't pop...this isn't bubblegum...these are songs about...real emotions." BAH. back to snoop behind the music for me!) i also agree with tim that part of the reason i do dislike this stuff so much is that so much it is so workman-like; i really have no compunctions about popstars wearing the clothes of the "counterculture" (fer instance, i hate most 60s music, but i love the monkees.) but because they came in the wake of grunge and because they've inherited those biases (and because they write their own songs?) there's nothing in a blink or sum41 song as effervescently pop as the monkees (or even cheap trick.)

And songs like "All the Small Things" really are slight. Boy bands do pop better.

I think you could tell a lot about these nu-metal/punk bands by whether they'd be prepared to join the RUMBA POP FESTIVAL!!! If yes, Classic, if no, Dud.

That said, I'm a Weezer fan- which forces me to wonder: "If it's not the lack of intriguing pop sonics that's ruining my pop punk, then what?" Maybe I simply like their songs, their hooks better. ("Hash Pipe" excluded.) At times they *do* sound more "honest" than the Sum/Blink bunch- less bratty and a little more lovelorn geek-soul tortured post-adolescent anger. (Which is, understandably, not a ringing endorsement for many here, but I like what I like.) And lastly, what I also kind of like (forgive me, Mel) is the most recent Blink 182 single. I'm not sure why, though. Maybe because it's their catchiest to date. Maybe because it retains some of that wide-eyed ("Let's make this last forever") yet awkward ("Could you tell that I didn't know what to wear?") teen romance shtick that I'm apparently still a suckah for. I'll think about it.

I remember Mike D. liking Blink 182 on his "Day in the Life of MTV" piece, I'd like to read his thoughts.

Weezer, I should note, are just as nondescript in my eyes. ;-)

Now this stuff is pop (as in actually popular & selling records), and for the most part I don't think the bands themselves have any compunction about being part of the corporate entertainment world. Getting mad at Blink 182 for being phony punks is like getting mad at the Monkees for being phony hippies - you have to wonder if anybody's really being "taken in". And any hypocrisy in their "fuck society" schtick is a lot less pronounced than LSE's Mick Jagger calling himself a street fightin' man or the MC5's White Panthers bullshit or any of the other phony radical poses that bands have used to attract middle class pinkos since the '60's.

Why is it cooler to say you like Britney than to say you like Blink 182? Because male hipsters can embrace cute girly pop as an emblem of their own transgressiveness and groovy open-mindedness, whereas the pop-punk bands are as aggressively "boy power" as the Spice Girls were the opposite, so its harder for the male hipster to get laid wearing a Blink-182 badge than a Britney badge. (But both are risky, so he'll wear a Modest Mouse or a White Stripes badge instead anyway.)

Wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine any of the teen punk set at a place like Rumba, I don't think. Half their fans would probably be going anyway. (Yes, I would have gone.) I would certainly give any band more respect for embracing their popness by being part of a pop festival.

I guess I also have a soft spot b/c Blink used to tour around the whole of Southern California before they got big. & a number of my friends were fans. & they were considered "fun punk" and had no problems rubbing shoulders with many of the more black flag hardcore influenced bands they shared venues with. So I grew up friends with their fanbase. And they weren't closet mysogenists. They were kids, who wanna have fun and piss off adults, but not too much coz they love their parents all the same. And they wanna dance.

As for AAF I disagree with Tim. I don't hear malice & irony in their cover the same way that Bizkit destroyed Michaels' "Faith". On the contrary, I hear a sort of reverence & respect -- they grew up with MJ & they're not ashamed. More power to them.

Finally, the Sum 41 single is indeed good, but it seems to be all hook, as opposed to blink, who if you can be troubled to listen, have plenty of stuff going on with guitars et cet. outside of the basic melodic line.

ok why did i use quotes and italics? anyway:

And maybe that's why it sounds so wrong, that these 33 ?!!!! year old guys are acting like they are 23 and writing songs describing the emotions of a 13 year old, making tons doing it and inspiring death-defying fealty at the same time. It's beyond absurd, but teo out of 3 Blink 182 member, I think, are twice as old as the median age of their average fan, whom they're pretending to articulte for. Like they're still shy and lonely and can't talk to girls - gimme a fucking break!!

Not that authenticity is everything, of course, and not that age is always relevant, since yeah, the Ozz man could be your grandfather and still appeal to you. But to pretend to exhibit adolescent confusion, to market and record that adolescent confusion, and to craft your entire persona around it with "gee whiz! we're running totally buck naked for the 4th time now in a vidot;yeeah - fight the system, dude!" just seems to sound like the death-knell of commercialism. And in a genre that ok, has more or less been faknellshion adjective for the past 15 years (" that Sid and Nacy movie sure featured some nifty PUNK outfits!" - 1986) but originally was conceptualized as a response to crass commercialism, as a way to combat that which was pre-fazed abricated in its most idealistic form, well yeah, I can understand tzed ahe Clash fanataic I've talked to who want to skin Blink182 alive. Naked.zed a

It may be a cliche, it may be a case of "defending empty canonical labels that don't mean anything syndrome" but some words are sacred to some people, and the word "punk" should just not be used. Note here that most Clash fan-atics feel the same way about Offspring/Rancid/Greenday too, but the fact sh fan-atithat they predated the teenboom they're seen with a sense of nostaslgic hate now, and hell I met one Clash fan that even liked Ransh fan-aticid since they're so obviously Clash wannabees. I personally tolesh fan-atirate Green Day since hell, I was 14 when Dookie hit and those sosh fan-atings mean something to me, so there's my daily serving of hypocrisy sh fan-atifor you. I think all the objections are just an emotional thing thosh fan-atiugh, as well as these preferences... But the videos, geez. The Sum41 one had a blatant cheesemetal hommage at the end, almost funny enough to qualify them as being passably cool... "All the Small Things" lampoons boy bands/teengirls but was a TRL mainstay - it was no different at all from the videos that it parodied, except that it was voted its no by boys instead of girls. Just as prefabricated, and in every other mus no sic community I've visited on the web, that usually implied a negative,s no but this was the first one I've been too where expressing a fons no dness for Britney/Destiny's Child has been hilariously appropriated bys no hip-conscious indie-kids, not that there's anything wrong with that, ss no ince I don't mind them, and I really shouldn't label this place that was no y, since I'm still learning about this forum (blogs etc.) Shit, I thinks no I'm going to get hell for that. I didn't mean "hip- conscious indie-kids" in a negative manner - I think I'm pretty defensive now!! But in any case, I wouldn't call the girl-stuff like DC "nu-R&B" no, it's still just 3rd r ate TLC rip-offs, entirely enjoyable, but wouldn't the Brandy - Monica thing be closer to teen-r&b? here's the corresponding question then, that i've seen asked before: are britney/christina barred from legitimacy from the masses sineen ce they are white whereas someone like brandy/monica can get away with een anything ? it's analogous to how bsb can sing boys Ii men melodies but geteen shit for it, while boys II men got respect..a race issue? this probableen y belongs on another thread, but i'm not gonna start one, since ive said enoughs with my fat lip

That's a pretty good definition of rock you've got there.

- Kurt Cobain, "Lithium"

Hm, and this 'we' is...? I mean, the whole thing just sounds silly to me.

And so it has been ever thus...

for the record i have always found that b182 video slagging boy bands etc. to be a much music highlight. but i would never give them my money.

surely they are as good as weezer?

or that band The pavements? actually i quite like the pavements, but i think calling them The pavements is HIllarious.

A very telling way of putting it. ;-)

on the other hand i think bands like b182 are the realm of cool kids who buy their own clothes thus automatically disqualifying a 15 year old version of me liking them.

Yuck.

http://instagram.com/p/duun0CLu1x/

i miss them

I was never a big Blink fan, they were after my 'time' but I like a few of their songs and respect that they've built something of a legacy despite always existing in a critical ghetto.