Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#13 Rilo Kiley, TAKE OFFS AND LANDINGS

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vs.

#116 Blink-182, TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS AND JACKET

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To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have two Designated Cheerleaders today, they’re both for TAKE OFF YOUR PANTS AND JACKET and both are much longer than you might expect for a 39 minute pop-punk album. They’re both absolutely terrific, though. So if the email gets cut off, be sure to check out the full newsletter in the archive.

The first DC is from @nanette.bsky.social! Take it away, Nanette!

Most DCs approach an album from a place of deep knowledge, understanding, and love — the result of a decades-long appreciation of an artist’s work. This is not one of those DCs.

I first listened to Take Off Your Pants and Jacket by Blink-182 on Saturday afternoon. I am writing this on Sunday morning after listening to the album a second time. I do not have a personal relationship with this album. I don’t know much about Blink-182 or pop punk in general; I was never the target audience for this genre. I’ll freely admit that some of this was snobbery—I felt that I was above this kind of sing-songy, formulaic music—but some of it was that I was already in my mid-20s when pop punk became a thing. The roots are in the early to mid 90s with the rise of Green Day, but by 2001 it seemed like the punk had been stripped away, leaving only simple tunes with mildly hard edges covered in a thin veneer of rebellion. This isn’t entirely incorrect, but after listening to this album, I realize that I’ve misjudged Blink-182, and that pop punk is actually an excellent counter to the messages that tweens and teens—especially boys—are being fed on a regular basis.

We hear a lot about the influencers who purportedly have captured the imaginations of young American men–the looksmaxxers and the pick up artists, those types. Their message: that your value is in your appearance, that your partner’s value is in their appearance, that there are low-value and high-value people, that you’re worthless if you can’t look and behave in a certain way, and that expressing your emotions is for lesser men. Everything is about having the upper hand over someone else–dominance is key and vulnerability is for wimps. Never mind that at least one of these dudes looks like a sentient rectal polyp wearing sunglasses and another one looks like a Ken doll that has come to life sans personality. Kids (mostly boys) are seeing this stuff and internalizing it and adults can’t stop talking about how we can bring these boys back from the brink.

Enter Blink-182.

The best way to get a message across to a middle school boy is to wrap it in a dick joke or something equally juvenile. And there’s some really juvenile shit on this album. Consider “Happy Holidays, You Bastard,” which admittedly made me snicker because it’s so crass and goofy. “It’s Labor Day and my grandpa just ate seven fuckin’ hot dogs / And he shit, shit, shit his pants / He’s always fucking shittin’ his pants” is some puerile nonsense. But I can totally see a 13 year old boy hearing this at a friend’s house and having his mind blown because it’s stupid and it’s funny and it feels transgressive. The dick jokes are a gateway into what this album is really about: how confusing it is to grow up, how nerve-wracking and uncomfortable it is to have feelings when the message you keep hearing is that men don’t express their feelings, how relationships are weird and complex. You’re pulled in because it rocks and your buddy played you the song about ejaculating in a sock and you found that hilarious, but there’s some surprisingly vulnerable stuff going on in the lyrics.

Consider “Rock Show,” a love story about two seventeen year olds who meet at the Warped Tour and fall fast and hard for each other. I’ve heard plenty of star-crossed yet ultimately doomed love stories in music, but they’re either a) from the woman’s perspective, or b) end in some kind of horrible denigration of that awful bitch who rejected you. (Murder ballads are good for this, I think that’s why they make me uncomfortable.) This is a young man, heart on his sleeve, extolling the virtues of this girl that he met. She’s not perfect, but she’s the coolest, and while there’s a sense that it’s over, he still says he’d do it all again if he could. There’s no hatred, no bitterness, just a lack of regret and a hope that maybe it could work out someday. Also, wouldn’t you love for someone to tell you that everything is better when you’re around? I think that’s a beautiful sentiment!

“First Date” does something similar. He’s about to go out with this amazing girl for the first time, and he’s terrified. He’s nervous and worried that he’s going to fuck everything up. This is the opposite of the message of those manosphere influencer clowns who treat everything as a conquest to be won. He’s opening his heart, he’s showing his soft underbelly, he’s saying, “hey, I’m nervous too, it’s okay to be nervous when you like someone and want to impress them so maybe they'll like you back.” But it’s couched in that simple pop-punk sound that’s bouncy and ever-so-slightly edgy. It doesn’t take an English major to parse these lyrics, either. You’re not sifting through metaphors and flowery language to get at the meaning. There’s no mistaking what’s being said in these lyrics; it’s all plainspoken and easily digestible.

Even the songs where things don’t work out never devolve into self-hatred or ex-hatred. Both “Ballad of a Lonely Guy” and “Roller Coaster” capture these feelings of disappointment effectively. No fault is assigned, no fingers are pointed, relationships are not treated like battles in an ongoing war between the sexes, it’s just something that happened and it’s sad and unfortunate and a good wallow is just what’s needed. There’s something touching about “And now I’m breathing deeply, walking backwards / Finding strength to call and ask her / Roller coaster, favorite ride / Let me kiss you one last time.” I’ve felt this way before. Have you felt this way before? Maybe you have! Maybe this song would have provided you with something you needed during that time, a reminder that feeling this way when a relationship ends is normal and okay and not a terrible thing. The whole album is, in its way, a celebration of vulnerability, of how awkward and difficult and confusing just existing in the world can be. We can tell our kids these things as often as we want, but we’re parents and what the fuck do we know? If our kids can get this message elsewhere–from Blink-182, perhaps–it might make them feel that much less alone in their feelings, and more open to expressing them rather than bottling them up.

My favorite class in library school was Adult Popular Fiction, a readers’ advisory class where we explored genre fiction in depth. We learned about genre conventions and why readers are drawn to particular genres (what we call “appeal factors”) and read a ton of books. One of the genres we read was westerns–which I’d never read before because those were books for old men like my grandpa, who devoured Longarm and Spur and Louis L’Amour. But I remembered my grandmother telling me how much she enjoyed Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey when she was a girl, so that’s what I read. And it was very satisfying! There was a stampede and tumbleweeds and a woman in distress and the villains wore black hats and the heroes wore white hats. It was everything I’d expect a western to be. I feel the same way about this album: it is exactly what I want and expect a pop punk album to be, perhaps even more, and as a result it is very satisfying.

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket isn’t perfect. It’s goofy as hell, it’s simplistic, it’s basic, it’s puerile at times. But not everything has to be James fucking Joyce. Sometimes you just want to read James fucking Patterson. An album that checks all the pop-punk genre boxes AND sends some surprisingly thoughtful and positive messages–targeted at young men!--about vulnerability and feeling all your feelings? I’d have been shocked if you’d told me this a week ago, but this Blink-182 album was extremely satisfying and I wholeheartedly enjoyed listening to it. If you give it a chance, I think you might enjoy it as well.

P.S. If you love Weezer but think you’re too cool for Blink-182, you’re wrong because it’s the exact same thing with louder guitars and a slightly different aesthetic. Oh, and more dick jokes.

P.P.S. You aren’t too cool for Blink-182.

Thank you, Nanette!

Next up it’s @onetrueposter.bsky.social. Take it away, OTP!

I must have been 14 years old.

I walk into the corner store, money in hand, ready to embark upon my very first purchase as a music listener. For the first time, I will add something to my collection of miscellaneous CDs, with intent and at cost. I'd heard this band a lot on the radio, and they intrigued me, appealed to my sensibilities, spoke to me on a deep level. And it didn't matter what store I went into to buy it, because I knew they'd have it.

Because that album was Boston's 1976 self-titled debut, featuring such eternal hits as "More Than a Feeling", "Foreplay (Long Time)", "Smokin", "Let Me Take You Home Tonight", "Rock and Roll Band", "Hitchin' a Ride", "Peace of Mind", and "Something About You". Brother, that's every song on the album, because to this day it's the only album I've heard every song from on the radio and I'd bet dollars to donuts you'd recognize every one whether you've ever intentionally listened to Boston or not. 17, count 'em, 17 times multiplatinum, as of 20 years ago, so who knows the figure now. Tom Scholz, studio mad scientist, didn't know it at the time, but when he released his impersonal, gleaming arena rock masterpiece, he'd put a timer on rock and roll as a world-conquering commercial form, because now there could only be an arms race, and war, and fallout. Boston is to rock music as Star Wars is to cinema. Put a pin in that.

I wasn't huge on Blink-182 as a teenager. No, I liked classic rock, and when I decided I had to start listening to the hip music so that I could be sufficiently schooled when I ventured out into the world, I did as anyone 30 years older than me would, and listened to Joy Division, and The Clash, and Bowie. Of course, as an awkward, white, male-shaped creature, I did listen to pop-punk—mostly Green Day and the Offspring, and close cousins Weezer. Dookie, Smash, Blue, these are worldbeating albums, these are albums cool people are willing to admit they liked as youths, even if they distance themselves now. I also liked Enema of the State, but that came late, in my senior year if not after graduating.

And I knew Blink-182 were abject. That they were for girls and those boys who styled themselves all metrosexual-like. Before I actually listened to Enema, I called them one hit wonders, because indeed, until the streaming era reconfigured things so that anything sufficiently viral could crack the top 40, "All the Small Things" was their only top 40 hit. Of course upon perusing the greatest hits I realized that I knew half those songs, as charts don't really tell the full story of the time when radio held more sway.

I actually got into Blink-182 because of a former friend I have not spoken to in eight years, because he was a pig who is almost certainly a rapist, if things I've heard since are true, and I'd be surprised if they aren't. I was friends with him longer than I should have been, only really cut him out of my life when I realized for good and all that he was not growing out of being Like That. But he loved Blink-182. And while he liked a lot of post-hardcore I had no taste for at the time, it was also his wont to play Future, Rick Ross, Manowar, Amon Amarth, so we had similar taste in swaggering musical expressions of masculine power & chauvinism. And Blink-182. And that's the thing about Blink-182, isn't it, they're a band you can lob just about any criticism at and it'll hit the mark, for at least some of their songs. They're simpering wieners, they're corporate sellouts, they're watered down mall music for babies, they're overproduced, they're annoying, they're incompetent songwriters, perhaps most pertinently for this paragraph, they're misogynistic frat bros when they aren't whiny incels.

I bring up this former friend of mine because I feel that he and I are a bit of a handy yin-yang. I am a conflict-averse, antisocial wallflower who always had too much stubborn liberal-minded sense and Cracked dot com fandom to become an incel but I do look the part, barring height. I got the stink on me. I reckon I've got many of the same hangups as incels, but thankfully, in a struck of luck, I'm just better than them. In contrast, this friend was a short dorky metalhead in early high school who in late high school sprouted and made a deliberate effort to craft a persona as an aloof, fashionable womanizer, and it more or less worked, through rigorous execution of the Boomhauer technique if nothing else; at the expense of a reputation as an enormous douchebag he excelled at getting into teenage girls' pants. He remained so as he aged. Had to come up at some point, this is a pop-punk defense piece, after all.

Anyway, we were both big fans of Blink-182. I should stress, I did not become a real fan of Blink-182 until I was an adult, 18 or 19. That was gay wiener stuff for most of my underage teen years. I guess I was always latecoming with this sort of thing. Go back to the beginning, 14 is a tad long in the tooth to be buying one's first record. My interest in girls did not extend beyond enjoying boobs until around the 16/17 passover I fell hard and I mean hard for a girl one year older than me who was about as close as a real person can come to a manic pixie dream girl, as interpreted by a 16 year old dork anyway—she looked like the lady from Pomplamoose, and talked in a perpetual tone of poker-faced ironic amusement. She liked Modest Mouse, indie rock. Psychoanalyze me as you will, I know I have. Much as I'd prefer it elsewise I do not think it's a coincidence that I retreated hard into heavy metal obsession not long after it was finally made evident to me that I would never have her. Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, they were as good as vitriol splashed at my very soul. 🎶Girls possess me, but they're never mine🎵

You see why I latched onto Blink-182 around this same time.

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is a record I've always had a bit of distance from. Dude Ranch is the cool pick for the good Blink-182 album, when their production was raw and full of sparks, and they were young enough for their juvenility to be charming—show me the hoity-toitiest snob who claims not to like "Dammit" and I'll show you a liar. Enema of the State is the cannonball of smarmy corporate pop-punk that delivers everything you could want, and not want, of a band like this. The self-titled album was dark, mature, it added shading to this clown band. And their reunion album, Neighborhoods, that thing is fuckin weird. Go listen to it, I mean it. Unstoppable force—Tom DeLonge, genuinely-eccentric UFO obsessive who thinks he's Bono & John Keel in one—meets immovable object—Mark Hoppus, fun-loving California partymeister. Cool but rude, party dude, you know the drill. Travis Barker hit drum. A bunch of songs full of bizarre imagery, herky-jerking between DeLonge's angular atmospherics and Hoppus's 4-on-the-floor good time militancy. It may be their best album, if it isn't Dude Ranch. And if it isn't this one.

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is the album on which Blink-182 realized, wow, we're one of the most popular rock bands on the planet, we could be the voices of a generation. And so they tried to be, deliberately. Blink-182 is always pandering to kids, subtextually when not stated outright (except on Neighborhoods, which is rather more adult in tone), but on this one that subtext is always explicit, they are throwing down the gauntlet and saying "we ARE the most important thing in kids' lives, and by gar we're gonna speak to that". So this is the most overtly-juvenile album they did, in the sense that it is speaking directly TO teenaged boys, about problems and feelings they're assumed to have. I'm not gonna lie. It can be corny. In fact, I daresay many of your jaws will have been set to scowl in the first minute, when Tom is sneering out "KIDS CAN'T VOTE ADULTS ELECT THEM". Blink-182 are saying in pretty clear terms that this album is not for you, adult person with normal mature concerns. And immature as I was and indeed am, even at around 19 I was like "welllll I'm not 15 anymore am I". I enjoyed this album, every song a toe-tapper. But I was still too close to childhood not to feel extra embarrassed to be listening to it, beyond the standard embarrassment of liking Blink-182. And you know what, I wouldn't really want to drive around blasting this with the windows down now, either, and I'm somebody who thinks it's cool to be seen listening to Limp Bizkit.

But I gotta say: on revisit, this album really leaps out at me, as just, the catchiest fuckin thing I've ever heard. I'm not gonna get maudlin, I'm not gonna tell you Blink-182 succeed at making a transcendent statement about youth and adolescent angst. What I am gonna tell you, is I appreciate albums that conjure an energy, a vibe, that take you to a specific place, better than anything else, and I am prepared to say that on Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, Blink-182 succeeded completely at making the most 14-year old album of all time.

If you've ever wondered what it feels like to be a 14-year old boy, even if you were a 14-year old boy and have visceral, textured memories of that time that contradict Blink-182's version of it, this is still more 14-year old boy than that. This album is about being annoying, and knowing you're annoying, and being lonely, and being horny, and wanting to explode, and not yet having the depth to draw forth any emotion more complex than frustration, and impatience, and a starry-eyed vision of what you imagine being slightly older will be like. God, I remember being 14. By the time I was 17, I knew I'd have a girlfriend, and a car, and I'd have like, a cool jacket, and I wouldn't be spending my time watching Simpsons commentaries. I'd be having some goddamned sex. I did get a cool jacket, and even a partner actually, at 17, though he has since transitioned, and 'twas never more'n PG, so I experienced my younger visions of being slightly older only by technicality.

Note that I said this is what it feels like to be a 14-year-old boy, not what it is like, as those are two very different things. And a big part of that is that very few teenaged boys listening to this are gonna have anything resembling the teen years described herein. Nobody listening to this goes on a first date all suited up hoping to hold hands, has enough teenaged girlfriends to experience the varying pitfalls of teenaged relationships described, exists entirely in opposition to their mean ol' square (but surely not abusive!) parents, and if you're the type of kid described in "Story of a Lonely Guy", you're not going to the fuckin prom, you're playing Smash Bros and masturbating to Jenna Jameson. Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (natch) is not just an immersion in 14 year old boy mindset, it is a fantasia. Because if you actually did do any of those things, you're probably not a Blink-182 fan. Remember my pickup artist friend with the entirely-artificial Sasuke Uchiha persona. There ya go. It is an album about being the version of a dork dorks wish they were, the protagonists of reality, Donnie fuckin Darko. Maybe I'm underestimating how crappy and boring my own teenage years were relative to others', but I suspect Blink-182's sunny-sad melodramatic version does not gel with the cringe-inducing specificity of most experiences, nor the genuinely unpleasant horrible things which are partel and parcel of the teenaged experience.

But that's what being a 14 year old feels like! You don't realize what a huge asshole you were until it's way too late (if indeed you ever do), or what a huge loser you were until later because you always think within six months you're gonna grow a foot upwards and a few inches forward, you're gonna meet the girl next door, it's all just around the corner. Do you have any idea how long I thought I was gonna meet the girl next door?

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket distills this gaseous teenaged copium into solid rock candy, and in doing so conjures this nonexistent childhood in one's own mind like a tulpa. I'M NOT COMING HOME, I'M NEVER GOING TO COME BACK HOME. That part of "Shut Up" gives me chills, and I basically never stayed out too late (the idea of having helicopter parents is almost entirely foreign to me); and the one time I did I woke up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, so I wasn't triumphant about it. In fact I believe I cried. To many, this is the problem with Blink-182: they are a punk rock Christmas tree, artificial, serving a version of youth that only exists for you if you're a lucky suburban turd, largely devoid of the rough textures that define real life. And yet, and yet. Listen, I know people are gonna chime in and say actually the jocks loved this shit, this was bro music, preps, yada yada yada. But I'm just telling you, most of the people, boys girls other, that I know who liked and like Blink-182 had an eventful childhood in a very different way from the one described in this album, whether they're scene kids, hardcore kids, or just impoverished losers. Even my horrible friend, he had a terrible home life, found out around age 17 that his dad who treated him like shit wasn't even his dad. A lot of Blink-182 fans, myself included, we don't like this because we relate to it. We like it because we wish we did, and it's nice to bask in the sun for a little while instead of stewing on bad memories and resentments.

If you're a bit older, and find yourself baffled as to why Blink-182, the corporate bastard bane of your youth, is still such a going concern, why they've endured when so much other cultural detritis has fallen by the wayside, this is why, and it's why they've carved out a larger space in the brains of under-40s than (anecdotally) ol' firebrand rock hero legacy-obsessed Green Day. Blink-182 are a band about feelings you're embarrassed to have felt, and experiences you wish you had. There's a certain, perhaps-unintentional melancholy I get from Blink-182, it's the very fact that they're a band whose lyrics are almost-entirely clumsy and ham-handed, that they don't sound like they ever lived on the streets or struggled with anything more severe than finding a ride to Taco Bell. There are thousands of hardscrabble punk bands with real things to say and vital emotions to express, there's so very much reality out there. There is really only one "punk" band that offers this very specific emotional helping hand, that speaks not to a universalism of experience, but a universalism of desire. If I were versed in sociocultural theory and whatnot here's where I'd expound about the shrinking of Americans' economic horizons and the youth's increasing pessimism about the future, about the poison of nostalgia, about the plague of pining for the nonexistent. But suppose I did and it all sounded very smart. Now me, I'm somebody who conceives of art as more symptom than problem, so I don't consider Blink-182 any more responsible for the younger half of this country's population's neverending adolescence and detachment from the real than Tarantino, or Pokemon, or The Sims, or Star Wars. We may be a nation addicted to baby food, and that's not good, you gotta eat adult food, but the fact remains that babies do in fact need to eat. Perhaps Blink-182 could only ascend to their status as generational touchstones in Baby Food Nation, but Baby Food Nation is where we live, so I'd at least like to shine a light on how they went about it.

So back to Boston. The mythology of rock and roll is a complicated thing, full of obfuscation and lies, but broadly speaking, rebellion is key. Rebellion against what? Often nothing. But bands who did not even pretend to rebel—Paul Revere & the Raiders, Gary Puckett & the Union Gap, Three Dog Night, etcetc—got stuck with pretty bad reputations, and this tended to bode ill for their longevity and cultural status. Three Dog Night was a fine band, with many classic songs, but they looked and sounded like they shoulda been hanging out with Cher, and they were discursively punished for this. While laughing to the bank, I don't doubt. But there's a reason the second thing you know about Three Dog Night after Jeremiah was a bullfrog is that guy fucked so many groupies his dick exploded. While the mudshark, that's probably the thirtieth thing you know about Led Zeppelin. Because Led Zeppelin were so suffused with rebellious rock and roll aura that their antics are an anchor, not a boon. They could all have been well-behaved family men and they'd be even cooler, because they knew how to talk the talk. What Boston presupposes is: what if it just doesn't matter that you don't talk or walk or do anything really. You simply SOUND. This was a pretty revolutionary idea, that you could make music that's more chrome than rock, and still be seen as a rock band, and treated as one, because you're just that good at making the sound. 1977: Foreigner self-titled. 1978: Toto self-titled. 1979: Cornerstone by Styx. 1980: Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon. 1981: Escape by Journey. In effect: Boston's absurd, overwhelming success ensured that from then on, rock's countercultural status was strictly optional, and where present, often layed on more affectedly or abrasively than ever. Rock music had a northstar, and it wasn't the Beatles, it wasn't Zeppelin, it was Boston, it was Frampton. Rock's fanbase getting bigger and whiter and wealthier made all of this an inevitability, but Boston was literally crafted in a lab to supercharge the process. Just over ten years later, Tom Scholz is outdone, when Mutt Lange brings his creature to life using Def Leppard as the raw clay.

And what else happened in 1976, 1977? Punk rock. Rock music now had an upper class, and a middle class, and a lower class, and a lumpenproletariat, and no matter how many infinite varieties of genuine counterculture continued to emerge, there was that star up in the sky, ready for you if only you strap on your wings. It is my personal crank theory that pretty much everything that ever happened in rock after 1976 is at least somewhat downstream of Boston's success. Until then there was really only one way to rock: well. And if you wanted to you could take the risk of being incredibly weird and uncommercial. But now that this musical death star had been assembled, "well" suddenly became loaded. Well what do you mean by "well"? If you rock well, and you do it to achieve superstar success & money, and for no other reason, what does that mean? What does it matter? Maybe I don't wanna be rockin' with Dokken. So you have rock bands that rock pointedly unwell, or don't rock at all, or sneak their rock through the side door, and there were avenues towards success in all these modes. There are so very many options that spring from the most obvious one becoming gauche.

By the time of pop-punk's golden age, rock music had been through so many upheavals and there were so many subclades and internicine conflicts that you needed They Live glasses to see the old arena jocks vs punk geeks dichotomy at work. Had to adjust to the meta—Whitesnake had been beheaded, so now Stone Temple Pilots are your jocks. And look at this fuckin guy in the hat. And these jerkasses putting a porn star on their album cover.

Pop-punk, having established itself as a permanent fixture with an album too good to be questioned (Dookie) exists in a constant state of both jock and geek, switching at need from song to song, listener to listener. This makes it versatile, difficult to kill (plainly) and also endlessly mockable. It's there in the name, a contradiction so inherent as to be entirely discrediting to many listeners. Full disclosure: I don't care even a little bit about punk credibility. Far as I'm concerned, go become a proper communist if you really care about things that matter, because I'm looking at the absolute state of the Dead Kennedys in the year 2026 and concluding punk credibility means exactly squat. The most truly punk thing to do is to not expend resources on music and do something that feeds people or builds labor power instead. It all just scans as cosplay to me. You bring the tunes, you bring the rock, you can be as self righteous or as sellout as you please. Well okay there is a sellout limit actually do not quote me on that.

Anyway the thing about Blink-182 is that they are superhuman savants at writing catchy, punchy rock music. Easy to roll one's eyes at mere catchiness, but in my opinion, it's actually hard to make consistently listenable catchy music just relying on tried and true melodies; you need musical dynamism, you need proper production, you need, pure and simple, the vital spark. There's a reason nobody listens to 60s bubblegum albums and says "wow this is a lost rock n roll classic" and that reason is that it all sounds the same and delve outside the hits you'll find a bunch of recycled blandly-hummable Herman's Hermits b-sides. So a band being able to make an album that is this catchy, this ear-grabbing, it's not something to be dismissed lightly.

And every single song on here would be the best single with the biggest shot at success for the overwhelming majority of alt rock or punk bands. I suspect many listeners are just too annoyed by the vocals and lyrics to do this, but pay attention to those instrumental tracks, they're fuckin tight, man. Not an ounce of fat, not too repetitious, it's rock and roll the way many say it ought to be. But it's fronted by these goobers so it gets dismissed as generic kiddie stuff. Like, I wanna be clear: I absolutely get why people hate Blink-182. I've stated quite a few reasons already. Enema of the State may well drop out of my next tabulation of 200 favorite albums simply because it is too caustic as regards women, too willing to inhabit the mindset of a bitter, sneering dork—traits you'll note have been sanded down here. On a purely sonic level, many are gonna find them annoying, and that's fair. But I think it's flatly untrue to call them talentless hacks. Many many punk bands, including many more sellouty and pop than Blink, would kill to have half their ability to put a song together. And I kind of mean it literally when I say "savants", because you go back to Chesire Cat, Dude Ranch, that innate tunefulness is always there, even when they are barely holding it together in the playing and compositions. Blink is a band that has always wanted for taste and discretion, that puts lyrical clunkers so jaw-dropping into multiplatinum albums that they're about the only thing that make me not suspect ghostwriting. And they put out a song like "The Rock Show", an absurdly perfect single, absolutely gorgeous ringing production, it's ridiculous. They're some of the least talented most talented guys of all time, if they were even 15% more savvy about presenting themselves and not coming across as posing yuksters, they'd be thrice as respected. Bit like Mötley Crüe in that way. But Blink-182 have waaaay more craft and songwriting diversity.

Take Off Your Pants and Jacket is their self-conscious arena blockbuster. In a certain light it failed at that, because it lacked a top 40 hit and sold half as well as Enema. It's a bit bizarre to clearly intend an album as your stratospheric swing for pop eternity, and also make it your album most likely to be grating to people over the age of 12, both in music and packaging. Again, no taste or discretion. But they pulled out all the stops, every song coated in sharp pop sugar. I can only compare it to the aforementioned Hysteria; not sure this is even pop-punk anymore, it's too widescreen and dynamic for that; it's arena punk. And that's another big piece of the puzzle of why this album intrigues me: it's a culmination, a synthesis. Boston (1976). Ramones (1976). Two great tastes that taste great together, I suppose. It's the journey of rock for a quarter-century distilled in one contradiction of a record, an expensive-sounding aircraft carrier album intended for and directed at children, bashing punk chords recorded to sound as massive and ringing as that chromium Scholz tone, just rebellious enough to make the dissonance all the more stark. On few albums does rock's position as centrifugal oppositional force in culture seem more preposterous; Blink is lucky Chocolate Starfish came out the year before. Blink-182 making their next album the mature somber post-punk adult one is THE savviest move they ever made, because it sealed their fans' loyalty forever and ensured they would not become Smash Mouth. There would be several attempts in the 00s to make these enormous cathedral punk albums, American Idiot, Infinity on High, The Black Parade, and I think all of these albums are taking a path first forged stupidly and heedlessly and against all odds successfully by Blink-182. The decline of rock can be identified in part by the execution of all remaining possibilities, and punk-as-AOR was one of the last big ones to be crossed off. When in order to do something new you need to do something that ought not be done, you know an artistic form may be in trouble. See also Sleep Token's dolorous romantasy Ed Sheeran rock. It's new, I give it that!

So what do we do with all this? Am I arguing that this stupid thing is a masterpiece? That this monument to rock's self-negating drain-circling at the End of History deserves to be in conversation for album of the year? In a word: yes. Gun to my head, when it comes to a record, especially a rock record, there is one thing that takes primacy above all others: does it go hard? The artist's conceptual shell game, the sincerity of the ideas contained within, the real-world context leading to the album being the way it is, the layers of meaning that can be untangled from careful craft, all of these things are secondary if not tertiary concerns in the realm of music, the most visceral and least intellectual artform. Although I've outlined some ways that Blink-182 can be considered extramusically, the bottom line is that I believe the pop craft here is unassailable. These three mooks are embarrassing, and they're tasteless, and they packed more fireworks in these thirteen tracks than most of the bands in this tournament could ever dream of. And even on the more abstract level, I don't believe there is another album that's doing quite the same thing as this one, aesthetically, and if there is, I'd be surprised if it does it as well. It is an idea—pop-punk—taken to an extreme, taken farther than it is advisable to go, and for that I have an artistic respect for it. Boundaries ought be pushed, even questionable ones, else there'd be some neat albums that never get made. The Strokes received acclaim for taking rock's status as a spent force and invoking it for jaundiced post-modern irony. Yes, this IS it, rock is over, and isn't that great, because now we can just spin the 1978 wheels forever and not feel guilty. It really grinds my gears that we're still expected to instinctively dismiss bands that ascended the heights through craft and talent because they didn't yearn dourly enough for music magazine guys 30 years ago, and if we don't like tuneless but Artistically Intentional mewling we gotta frame it as a hot take, like I'm supposed to be sorry Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a bland 6/10 compared to their early countryfied albums. So I want to applaud actual innovation. I want to give Blink-182 a medal for recognizing there were still new ways for rock to embarrass itself with panache while stealing the hearts of millions.

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Thanks,

Kent