In all honesty, podcasts are a major part of my life. There is a large majority of the content that is produced while one is blasting into my ears, centering me as I get through the hard parts. The issue is that because of how podcasts generally are made, it’s difficult to find any reason to want to write 1500-2000 words about any of them. Even the best feel like they’re incapable of satisfying my word count because for the most part they exist under a certain camp: they’re entertaining. That’s all. It’s easy to see why despite them being a major part of my life, they’ve rarely been a major part of this website.
Though I couldn’t go this week without paying tribute to one of my all-time favorites. If you want to know my hierarchy of favorite shows, you can determine by how eager I am to listen on certain days. For Blink-155, they have been a prominent fixture of my Fridays (usually mornings) going on three years. Every Thursday evening I turn to my feed, anticipating which song from the Blink-182 catalog they’ll likely talk about. To be totally honest, I haven’t heard all (then) 155 songs that the band released. In fact, I still haven’t heard most of them. What I come to the show for is not so much to discover new songs, but to understand why this band continues to endure.
I understand if you’re not someone who wants to jump onto Blink-155 in 2020. It’s much more daunting than it used to be when the early run of episodes promised to be perfectly edited exercises in 45 minutes. Cut to the penultimate episode “Just About Done,” and you’ll see how little they’ve stuck to their promise. Not only did they revel in pushing the episode past the four-hour mark, but spent the first half not even talking about the song. It was intentionally obnoxious and the perfect embodiment of why this show is sometimes best consumed at 2x speed.
But please don’t start at “Just About Done.” In the larger canon, it’s not really all that important of an episode, more of an antagonistic victory lap before their final episode tomorrow on their biggest hit “Dammit.” It’s a moment that I’ve been anticipating for hears, and to be totally honest, I can imagine them riffing for 30 minutes on the idea of “I guess this is growing up.” To be honest, it’s either going to be the epitome of the show at its best, or at its most entertaining. It’s a moment that I’m anticipating, but I can only hope they announce a new project by the end.
Because the show is a multi-tiered creation. To love Blink-182 is the entry point. To understand the world of hosts Josiah and Sam is another thing. Before I dive into the latter, I’ll start with the former and why this show is among the most essential explorations of music’s impact on our societal connection. It may lack the pretentiousness of better-researched shows, but at its core, it’s two friends talking about a band they love, and they couldn’t be any less perplexing if they tried.
To be direct, I like Blink-182. They’re a band that I owe a lot to thanks to being in middle school during their peak, at the perfect age to understand what their childlike wonder was truly about. “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” was the first album I ever bought, and I still remember the day they initially broke up, deciding to blast “What Went Wrong?” for lack of better expression. I managed to catch them live during the reunion following “Neighborhoods,” but little did I know that the band I loved was going to crumble in the near future, replacing guitarist Tom Delonge with The Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba. Full confession: I am still reluctant to listen to anything during this period, as I worry it will just sound terrible and off.
But the gist of Blink-155 was fascinating as much as it was borderline Worst Idea of All Time territory. What would happen is Josiah and Sam talked about every song in their catalog? At the start, it was 155. By the end, they had a dozen more to cover with “Nine.” Even if those songs weren’t likely to be new favorites, I was thankful that it bought us more time with the show, allowing them to expand their mythology.
Of course, Sam and Josiah would be the type of guys to shut me down for showing any reverence towards the podcast. They intentionally have an antagonistic mood, recognizing how dumb this idea actually was. And yet, the subtext is that they don’t want to let go of it. There’s an escapist attitude to this that is incredible, finding a band that bridges 90s skate-punk to the contemporary rock scene. They’ve taken several shapes throughout, and it’s shined through every episode here. As much as they buy into the gimmick of satirizing self-important shows with videos about fridge repair and intros that work in the title through puns that are often surprising.
It’s all part of the anticipation that they’ve personally built over the years. The show is as much a cult of Blink-182 as it is these two Canadian rock journalists who have connections to everything from Christian punk to Soundcloud rap. They have a fascination with music as an art form, telling stories about their personal tours and having asides that remind you that yes, they are in fact Canadian. I don’t always understand it, but I love how regional this show feels.
So, what exactly does Blink-182 have to say about the world? On the surface, you can argue not a lot. After all, they released a song called “Fuck a Dog” once. Most of their early albums have cringe-inducing euphemisms. They have problematic joke songs, and it’s confusing how they transitioned into a serious band only to return to something more sad as they approached middle-age.
That’s the starting point of understanding the band’s complicated history. Every band member has its own interesting history. Sam and Josiah would be the first to tell you that former drummer Scott Reynor is much more interesting than Travis Barker. They’ll also suggest that people’s favoring of Delonge or bassist Mark Hoppus says something deeper about them. After all, one has to wonder how Delonge went on to be a major expert on aliens. Maybe he was the serious one all along, adding something very specific that Skiba truly lacks.
They’ve formed their own personal presence on Twitter, managing to have several joke accounts that take their jokes out of context and create this own homegrown universe that is fascinating to watch from afar. There are even regional groups like a Sacramento account that takes everything through different prisms.
But of course, what’s most exciting is not so much the songs themselves, but the strange universes that they created. Go beyond the fact that they have fans from now three distinct periods of their career. On the one hand, you have people who started liking the band following the album “California.” There are those who stopped enjoying them after “Enema of the State.” There are endless covers on YouTube to pull from, as much revealing how many tropes vocally that the band originated as well as how creatively some songs can be interpreted. The average episode ranges from covers that include acoustic to a beloved genre on the show called “night-core.” If you don’t know what that is, then strap yourself in.
This is a show that attempted to get every member on the show for an interview. While they came up short, it wasn’t from lack of trying. The anticipation that the band would even humor this exercise was admirable, especially when Hoppus agreed around the release of “Nine.” Otherwise, it’s a cross-section of people obsessed with their music to people in random fields, all discussing how they feel about Blink-182. The interviews are as insightful as the discussion by Sam and Josiah thanks to how confused they sometimes are.
It’s important to note that while Blink-182 was a successful band, they were also a divisive one that only appealed to a certain market. To hear everyone’s journey to the band is fascinating. They even featured a member of Imagine Dragons that, comically, featured a conversation about forgiveness one week and lead to a recurring bit where Sam now claims that Imagine Dragons are awesome. There’s a whole bunch of recurring segments about bands they’ve begun liking (most recently with Hinder) that only add to the welcoming vibe of this show. They have a whole community of fans that have become just as kooky as any Blink-182 song. In fact, not taking anything seriously is kind of the point.
In my humble opinion, Blink-155 manages to feel like a show about everything because it captures how obsessive people can be over the music. In some cases, it’s helping to get people through a rough time. At another point, it’s wondering why there are so many bad incest songs. It’s all part of the richer tapestry, capturing at least a few minutes dedicated to every topic. I can only imagine that there’s a lexicon where you can click and listen to every time they talked about Delonge’s obsession with aliens, or how many times they claimed that their current song of discussion is in their top five (fun fact: it’s more than five).
There’s passion and curiosity at every turn. Even when they act like they don’t like a song, there’s something there that keeps you listening, hoping to discover the strange fascinations of these men. There’s psychoanalysis by rank amateurs mixed into a discussion of punk history and random jokes that go nowhere. It’s aimless, but it’s also a show that conveys how one band can change the world in so many ways. Some of the obsessiveness is more sarcastic than others, but it still manages to present a full portrait of grown men whose view of sex is still very juvenile. These revelations may be obvious, but they’re only that way once you notice them.
I’m sure that this all comes across as a bit lopsided and anticlimactic at points, but that’s part of Blink-155’s charm. There are weeks where it feels like nothing matters while others have their best songs in the world. They introduce you to covers that can be downright inspiring (I still think about the “Yo” cover of “Adam’s Song” once a week) and have these rich conversations that have become their own subplots throughout the show. You begin to root for them by the end. Not to the point of enduring four hours, but 2.5 is a pretty good average length.
As of this publication, I have no idea what they’re going to do as an encore. I can’t imagine them disappearing with “Dammit.” They need to continue this journey, going down some strange path that will open up a whole new world. The issue is that there’s no band that is as much a mess and all over the map as Blink-182. Even if they did Green Day, there’d be a point where they just got bored having to do 50 songs about political angst. Maybe they’ll do the various side projects, such as +44, Boxcar Race, or Angels & Airwaves. Again, they’re not as interesting as their hub band, but that’s because they’re fragments of a bigger, more interesting picture.
I don’t know what these guys will do, but I don’t want them to go. They have come to mean so much to me, and my Fridays will be far less interesting without them. I hope they stick around, reveling in the joke that Blink-155 was a thankless task that would never end. Then again, that’s how it always goes. Sure newcomers may have issues loving the show just because of an average episode length, but for those who have been on board all along, it’s a rewarding journey that I wish had more to say. There’s always more to say when it comes to this band. I’m just thankful that there were two guys bold/dumb enough to discover just how complex and rich this band truly is not just to fans, but to those approaching their music fresh. Nobody was excluded from this show, and it’s a friendly exercise in how music connects us all, even over very dumb jokes about “Ben Wah Balls.”
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