Feminists did, though, and rightly, given that the band regularly asked fans to flash their boobs and sang about wanting a "girl that I can train." Really listen to the music, though, and something other than the classic male-rocker-pig tropes of conquest comes to the fore. (Delonge on boy bands to Launch magazine: "They choreograph everything, including the sex they have with each other after the shows!")Īs far as I can tell, gay-rights groups never seemed to much mind Blink’s antics. would have ever dared, implying that it was Blink's chart rivals who had something to hide. They even made fun of the repressed camp that characterized boy bands, with the parodic “All the Small Things” video showing way more skin than Brian Littrell and co. This was, counterintuitively, a macho performance. And so it is that in that same EW article, Delonge dropped the g-word when talking about his friendship with Hoppus: “It sounds stupid and gay, but the first time we sat down and played together, it was just magical.” The thing is, to some people it would sound kind of gay, and the guys' camaraderie is part of what inspires "shipping" blogs and slash fanfiction and fake religious-right screeds about the band.įaced with the options of acknowledging how their friendship might be perceived or repressing it, Blink-182 dove with glee into “acknowledge,” and the result was winking butt-grabs and boxer-clad photoshoots and songs about prison rape. But in modern Western society that often sees queerness as a pathology, it gives rise to sexual suspicion. In the mastering studio-pretty much anywhere.'' That unselfconscious locker-room intimacy is, in a historical context, pretty normal. In a 2000 Entertainment Weekly feature story titled “Nude Sensation,” producer Jerry Finn said that the guys really just hung out that way: “I saw them naked more than I ever care to see anyone naked. Stripping down wasn't just savvy business, though. It made them into pinups of a sort never quite seen before or since: more overtly sexual and yet down to earth than either the spandex-clad rockers of a decade earlier, or the boy bands on the airwaves at the time, or their present-day analogue Five Seconds of Summer (who, in pointed contrast to Blink, cut cameras at the moment of trouser drop). The band members have said this was, in part, a marketing strategy. On posters, on album covers, and on the streets of Los Angeles in the video for their hit song “What’s My Age Again?” the trio for a time seemed to be naked, together, constantly. The three dudes of Blink-182 really did appear to love each other, so intensely that they couldn't help but make performance art about same-sex affection as they conquered adolescent America.Ī queer reading of Blink-182 may almost be too obvious to make, too easy for anyone who grew up watching MTV around Y2K. But playing with and panicking at the idea of being gay was actually more vital to the band's identity than bathroom humor and skirt chasing were, and that's why their current crisis is so striking to watch. Like, Metallica has Master Of Puppets, and we’ve got All The Small Things.This is all, of course, typically juvenile homophobic idiocy, an extension of the same shtick that led the band to sing about having sex with dogs and land an American Pie cameo and put a porn star on the cover of an album titled Enema of the State. “We’ve got a lot of really cool songs in blink, and it’s weird to me that that’s the one. And I go, ‘Really?!’ It’s like Hanson – it’s like these kids playing the old pop-punk. Literally four times a month there’s a cover band playing that, and someone I know films it and sends it to me. Interestingly, he continues that there’s another blink-182 classic that he’s not so fond of: “We have an old blink song called All The Small Things and I’m like, ‘I sound like I’m fucking four years old!’” Tom says. While on Tuna On Toast With Stryker (watch below), Tom is asked by host Ted, “Do you love ‘ the voice inside my yead’?” to which the singer responds, “Yes! It’s in my new song – we have a song that we just put out called Losing My Mind off of Angels & Airwaves’, and the last chorus says, ‘ The voice in my yead.’ I actually put it in there – it’s y-e-a-d. Having parodied and lip-synced along to ‘ voice inside my yead’ in blink-182’s I Miss You in the past, Tom DeLonge has said in a new interview that he loves that iconic line and pronunciation.
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