The Hidden Promise of blink-182

This is Flirted With You All My Life, Niko Stratis’ column of personal essays about the intersection of sobriety, popular culture, recovery and music. Catch up on last month’s installment here.

I think I’m an easy mark, and this is why I’m always wary of cults. I don’t think I would ever join a cult—this needs to be stated loudly and immediately—but I am wary of them all the same. This is my addict brain talking, the part of me that wants—that craves—feeling good; the part of me that knows I will also always feel bad and would do anything to, instead, feel nothing at all. This is the snake lying in wait in the tallest grass of all sinister promises, if you let yourself feel nothing you will never again have to feel bad. You will never feel good, but isn’t it better to feel nothing at all than feel anything so terrible as all this?

The first time I ever drank so much that I felt nothing at all, I was a teenager with a loud and anxious brain that never once went silent and the only way to ensure I would never have to remember how it felt to teeter on that fine line between good and bad was to cut the wire. Drink. Blackout. Forget. Nothing. Repeat. Wake up in the dark with no memory of ever doing or being anyone.

There was this idea of the perfect version of myself, an illusion cast that was never real but felt promising all the same. That, if I could be aloof and carefree, dumb and loud and boisterous, that it could all work to distract from anything real, too. I liked punk rock from a young age because it was loud and it was angry and it was frenetic and it felt like my brain often did; ceaseless, reckless, elbows up, fists in the air, always moving, never real. Punk rock never felt real, this was part of its appeal, it felt like nothing. This is how I fell in love with blink-182.

In 1997 Dude Ranch slowly began to gather heat, building into a flame that would burn wildly out of control. “Dammit” had been on the soundtrack to Can’t Hardly Wait and, despite the prevalence of “Turn It Up (remix)/Fire It Up” by Busta Rhymes at house parties for an entire perfect summer, “Dammit” was the song that haunted me from that CD. Southern California punk rock had only just started to reveal itself as a dominant force; pop punk was then just barely a term on our lips to be spit with venom or derision.

The first time I saw the video for “Dammit” on TV, I caught it on Much Music at a friend’s house, between repeated plays of “Barbie Girl” by Aqua and Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Gonna Be.” I felt like my heart might explode. Here was the promise of nothing; being able to feel so alive in the face of heartache that you can be goofy and playful and a bit of a jerk all at once. You can thrive, you can laugh it off and enjoy life. All you have to do is write all this pain off as meaningless. While I guess this is growing up was the repeated phrase of the chorus and it felt true, this is growing up—hearts closing off as the years left notches on their walls.

When you grow up, you learn to mask all the parts of you that feel too many complicated things a little too loudly. Bury it all, every last living thing growing in the fertile soil of your mind can still be overturned. I learned to survive by masking all of my feelings with anything that was within reach. Sarcasm and bad jokes and alcohol. I listened to Dude Ranch on repeat in my basement and it felt playful, fun with only a slender hint of something sinister. Sometimes you can’t even see the darkness, hidden there between dick jokes and audio clips that make it sound like someone is making out with a horse. But there is something else here, something so desperate to be heard and so terrified to be perceived.

This sort of blink-182 fuckboy was an easy lie to fall into. This is why I think of myself as an easy mark, it was so simple to lose myself in the promise of something that was never real and never going to be. In high school, I learned to feel nothing, just to party and drink a little too much; be silly and playful and fuck around too much; feel nothing, share no parts of myself and let no one see that hidden darkness nestled in between tasteless jokes and innuendo. Let no one ever take me too seriously and there will be no expectations anchored to my life.

On Dude Ranch, blink-182 hid their heart in places like “Dick Lips,” a song title begging to be censored in Walmarts nationwide that, nonetheless, was about the time that Tom DeLonge was kicked out of high school for getting drunk at a basketball game. It was, more than that, about fearing the wrath of his disappointed parents—and the cuts to the soul from the self loathing of knowing what psychic damage we wreck upon ourselves as we succumb to our own reckless desires; dreams chased in vain efforts to prove ourselves fearless and indestructible. When blink-182 released Enema Of The State in 1999—replacing drummer Scott Raynor with Travis Barker at the same time—sellout was a word so many of us wielded like clumsy hands slashing wildly with an uneasy blade. All the artists we had once held so precious were now making money—part of the corporate machine—and punk rock idealists held them responsible for their deception.

Where on Dude Ranch they had pondered the weight of growing up, on Enema Of The State they were grappling with the truth of it all. They were in their mid-20s now and, as teenagers, your mid-20s felt like an ocean away. The first time I am aware of having been blackout drunk was a year later, in 2000, when I was 18. We were all at a house party; we had a friend whose mom was cool—and cool moms let teens drink to excess at her house because then at least she could keep an eye on us and, honestly, this was the safest we would ever be. That same year, we got a friend fired from his job as the night janitor at a daycare when the owner burst in on a few of us who used his workplace as a private function. She found us drinking on the sofa and using tiny plastic chairs to roll joints on.

Partying helped me give myself over to the promise of feeling nothing—the nothing to be found by crushing cans of cheap beer I guarded in the white plastic grocery bag I had brought them in, shots of fireball whiskey and tequila and who knows what else. A cartoon of a punk rock kid, aloof and carefree and wild. Feral. Drunk. Sad. Broken. Avoiding all feelings and needling questions. An overactive, loud and anxious mind always pushing and pulling with questions that demanded answers. Drink. Blackout. That night at a friend’s house—under the supervision of a cool mom—I aimed myself towards oblivion, woke up a day later in total blackness despite my eyes being open and, in a panic, I bolted upright and smashed my face on the underside of a shelf. I had burrowed like a wild animal into the linen closet and slept there, and when I crawled out I had blood and sharpie on my hands and arms with no recollection as to why.

Enema Of The State finds three men grappling with being in their mid-20s, an age that only feels old until you have passed it and then begins to feel impossibly young. But now, the weight and the ennui and the heart that have long been smothered by a desperate need to feel nothing feels more urgent, pressing. Between “Dysentery Gary” and mega hit “All The Small Things,” blink-182 smuggles a desperate plea to be seen as more than just stylish music videos lampooning nascent boyband culture and jokes they were increasingly getting too old to make.

Now, they were adults letting their guards down, slowly letting you in on the secret, too—that all of this posturing is hiding something, that there is darkness here and they are not always handling it well and all of this, the focus-group approved nudity and the glossy sheen on scrappy punk rock, is meant to delight you. It is here to make you laugh or cringe or throw your fists into the air and dance until your feet bleed and fall to pieces. It is also, though, meant to shine a light onto all of your dark places. It needs you to know that there is something else here, too, something real and painful that has gone unnoticed due to the clever subterfuge of well-placed dick and diarrhea jokes.

“Adam’s Song” is the first time the band slowed down. This pace they had set of breakneck speed and palm-muted oblivion is untenable. We all grow up, and we all have to confront what is eating away at our souls—or it might come to claim us in the darkness, the places we don’t remember that are capable of unseen terror. I felt betrayed in my youth by this song, because it felt too real and it asked me to slow down. It asked me to consider my own pain and my own heart and head—and all of those things were too real and too urgent, and I was so desperate to feel nothing because I could not stand feeling anything real.

If you are convinced of the value of a lie long enough, you can commit yourself forever to its cause. After Enema Of The State I listened to blink-182 still but with different ears: judgmental at times and wistfully pining for lost days in others and, sometimes, secretly in love with how they were changing as they got older—even when they became painfully earnest. “I Miss You” was a wedge between people who held onto them as a single-lane highway leading out of Southern California and others who were eager to see what pathways they might open up if they just finally let themselves go anywhere they desired. I thought it was kind of catchy and charming, if only because it felt so different from what we had come to expect from the trio—and after so much desperate posturing that meant nothing, it was nice to imagine trying to pretend to be someone new.

It was easy in my youth to fall victim to the promise of feeling nothing because it felt good just long enough to become an impossible dream to ever fully grasp. Nothing ever lasts forever, all the darkness and truth you have been trying to hide will show itself eventually. blink-182 are easily drawn as naked men running through life without care or concern, because they showed us this just long enough for it to feel like their singular contribution to the world; a sleight of hand trick meant to draw your attention away from what is really being said.

But to believe blink-182 as only sophomoric nudists and punks too old to act so young betrays the deep and vibrant heart they have, in their own way, doled out slowly and carefully. On Dude Ranch they never allowed themselves to be perfect or infallible, never always the victim and not always villains but something in the middle; young men reacting as best they can to a world rapidly shifting around them, using the humor of juvenile instincts to distract when the heat draws too close. As they moved into Enema Of The State, they questioned what damage they had done to their souls as they slowly aged, the fear of oncoming adulthood and the life it demanded of them, of us.

I was so enthralled with the promise of an easy answer that it took a long time to fully grapple with the truth of what had always been there. I’m 41, have been out as trans for close to a decade now and sober for four years, approaching five with rapid certainty. In recent years, I’ve begun to dig through the music that mattered so much to me as I was struggling to make my way through youth. I’m learning to be kinder and gentler to my young self, when I was too scared of too much and never in a safe place to be seen or truly heard.

This year, the classic lineup of blink-182 reunited with a new album, One More Time…, after a lengthy stint with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba sitting in for DeLonge, who had gone off to extravagant side projects and alien inquisitions. Maybe this is the last time we get an album from these three, who are now grown men with families and traumas and the weight of a life lived as loudly and as honestly as they could. It’s an album that conjures many feelings, at times nostalgic and at others triumphant. It is a celebration, more than anything, of blink-182’s journey and the time it took them to arrive at this place. Mark Hoppus has lived through a cancer scare, Travis Barker nearly lost his life in a plane accident. Tom DeLonge had to leave to find his own path and what it meant to be more than just one of the three pillars of a band that has survived longer than anyone ever imagined possible.

We have all journeyed our way here and, with the end of the year looming, it is always important to take stock and find ways to be kinder to all the days and years before us that we can’t change. I have always been an easy mark, despite having never been in a cult—but there was the promise of feeling nothing that led to my finding myself lost in dark places. But there is time still to sit up, smash your face and bleed and feel bad, feel the blood run down your face and feel bad but feel alive. We are never promised a perfect life of feeling good and perfect all the time. The perfect promise of the world is never that we will feel nothing, but that, sometimes, when you feel good, you feel more alive than you ever dreamed possible—and only sometimes will you feel the weight of all of the things pulling you down. Those valleys are only the low points, and there is always going to be something to bring you back up. It’s how we learn to move through these moments that define the future still ahead of us. Desperate to feel anything at all.

Niko Stratis is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in outlets like SPIN, Bitch, Autostraddle, Catapult and more. Her work primarily focuses on culture, the 1990s, queer/trans topics and as often as possible where all those ideas intersect. Niko lives in downtown Toronto with her fiancé and their dog and 2 cats. She is a cancer.