By Chris Kenner
Staff Writer, ‘11
photo courtesy of popartuk.com
For those of you living under a rock, blink-182 is back! One of the most influential pop punk bands of our generation is touring again, and you too can get the chance to see them. But before you do, I’d like to provide you with a little bit of history of the band.
The Success
On June 1, 1999, Enema of the State was released. The album was very successful and has sold somewhere around 15 million copies worldwide. It is blink-182’s third and overall best selling album. This album placed the band among the time’s biggest recording artists on the musical front line of America. It contains the hits, “What’s my age again?” and “All the Small things.” The album peaked at #9 on the Billboard Top 200.
Released on June 12, 2001, Take off Your Pants and Jacket was also hugely successful, it debuted at #1 on the Billboard Top 200, a first for the band. The album sits as blink-182’s second best selling album, and contained the hits, “The Rock Show” and “Stay Together for the Kids.” With this album, they stuck to the formula that drove them into superstardom, and flew on top of the world in a genre that has been labeled as pop punk.
The Split
On November 18, 2003, with the release of their self-titled album, Travis Barker, the drummer of blink-182 stated that this album was supposed to represent a “new” and seemingly more mature blink-182. The album debuted at #3 on the Billboard Top 200, sold 313,000 copies in the first week and spawned the hit singles, “Feeling This,” “I Miss You,” “Down,” and “Always.” The album enjoyed a positive reception from both fans and critics, most notably Rolling Stone, where it received four out of five Stars.
Tension arose in the band as vocalist and guitarist, Mark Hoppus, grew betrayed by the formation of Box Car Racer, a side project involving Barker and Tom DeLonge, the guitarist and second vocalist for blink, was formed in 2002 to experiment with ideas that were not thought to be “blink friendly.” The bands’ breakup was foreshadowed by them canceling their appearance on Linkin Park’s Music for Relief concert in South Asia. On February 22, 2005, their manager called Hoppus and Barker to inform them that DeLonge quit the band. The sent blink-182 into an indefinite hiatus.
The Reunion
Blink-182 was then split into two bands that were pretty successful with Tom DeLonge fronting Angels and Airwaves, whose debut album peaked at #4 on the Billboard Top 200, and Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker forming a new band +44, whose debut album peaked at #10. On February 8, 2009, to the surprise of the fans, Hoppus, DeLonge, and Barker appeared onstage together for the first time since December 2004 at the 51st Grammy Awards. Barker then said, “We used to play music together, and we’ve decided that we are going to play music together again.” Hoppus went on to add “blink-182 is back!”
A message appeared on the blink-182 website later that night confirming the group’s reformation, and adding that the band was in the studio writing and recording a new album and preparing for a world tour. Official tour dates were announced to start in Las Vegas, NV on July 23, and end on October 3, 2009, in Atlantic City, NJ. Almost all reviews of the new shows state that “it feels like they never left,” and “blink-182 is picking up where they left off.” In my opinion, fans are as excited as they were when the band was at the height of its success. I think we can expect something far better, and as a fan of both pop punk and alternative rock, I’m hoping that they use what they learned from their non-blink projects and blend the two genres to give us something amazing.
