I can’t see the ’90s but I can HEAR them. Sure, they’re long-gone. I know. Nobody says “Pimpin’ ain’t easy” these days, much to the relief of all of us. We know longer must endure pervy, delusional commentary from Adam Corolla or tongue-in-cheek sports analysis from quirky Sports Center anchors.
But I can FEEL the din of petulant antipathy toward Blink-182: “I’ll tell you how ‘punk’ Blink… are,” being one particular nugget that comes to mind.
Indeed, as cliched as it is, it almost bears mentioning the plain impossibility of objectively assessing Enema of the State, in light of the fathoms of spiteful rhetoric it seemed to attract from the masses.
As we know, anyway, time has been good to the lads: Travis Barker is still very much in the limelight, pretty much the epitome of cool, and, gosh darnit, we still hear these songs all the time, everywhere we go, with “All the Small Things” of course being the primary bastion of this phenomenon.
“Adam’s Song”; then, is kind of the complicated step-brother lurking in the background, not sure if he wants to try to be punk or a nerd, not sure if he wants to skate or paint. In stark contrast to “All the Small Things” and “What’s My Age Again?”; and even “Rock Show”; while we’re at it, this is a song you’re very unlikely to ever hear in a public place. Just as it’s a song pertaining to the theme of solitude, it best bears listening by the solitary individual. Often the hardest-hitting music is like this, in my opinion, perhaps of course related to Freud’s “herd mentality” motif of the group of people more resembling an animal in mindset. Extremely egregious was the recent episode of this dude in this bar trying to outdo my music taste and selecting the albeit holistically wonderful “Cowboy Dan” by Modest Mouse for the prototypically gregarious occasion, much to the considerable discomfort of everyone present.
For me, I know, I’ve never considered playing “Adam’s Song” in public. In my mind, though, I firmly hold it as the band’s best song.
Anyway, the primary focus of this article is meant to be the band’s pop-punk style, and how, in my opinion, this instrumentation of guitar/bass/drums actually serves to add to the song’s potency and meaning. It’s a song about a sensitive person. It’s a song about one of us, about a person who was driven to a desperate state of mind. And it’s even partly autobiographical, on the part of Mark Hoppus, as is widely reported online.
There are no lies in a suicide note. If said occasion isn’t time to “pull the cup” and impart all relevant nuggets of information, I don’t know what would. And they’re written in plain diction with plain pad and paper, or so I assume.
The pop-punk, or garage rock, style, of “Adam’s Song” is a non-statement on the part of someone who has explored it all. It’s the gesture of someone who has tried to be cool, and failed, in a sense, in terms of embodying a musical fabric already ubiquitous and trending. By choosing a musical interface, anyway, that’s already so popular, the band are making the statement that they don’t need “style” in order to prove their point, or to bolster their artistic credibility. The accusations that Blink-182 aren’t “punk” enough, of course, are operating under the inaccurate tenet that it’s always advantageous for bands to play abrasive, difficult music, instead of music that’s more palatable and universally enjoyable for all. “Adam’s Song” is a sad song written by a dude on the closest, most obvious sort of musical tool he could find. There was simply no reason to do anything else.
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