Blink-182's 'Take Off Your Pants & Jacket' At 15: An Adolescent Awakening
For those of a certain generation, Blink-182 is viewed as Green Day's younger brothers, a band who took their predecessors' saccharine hooks and schoolboy delinquency and made it even more commercial. From outside the pop-punk canon, it makes sense: GD was playfully immature and had a brilliant ear for digestible riffs, a sonic mentality that inevitably interested Mark, Tom and drummer Scott Rayner—later the ineffable force of Travis Barker—but Green Day and Blink's narrative arcs couldn't be more disparate.
From the very beginning, Green Day felt a certain investment in political prowess while making weed jokes (hell, even their name is a weed joke.) Self-parody was always met with a level of self-seriousness, before the latter completely overtook the former on 2004's punk rock opera, American Idiot. Blink's thematic development, however, is much more linear. You can pinpoint the moment the transition away from the jokes began to happen: June 2001, with their fourth full-length, Take Off Your Pants & Jacket.
To best position the release in Blink's chronology, we have to go back to the album that paved the way for it, 1999's Enema of the State. It was the band's second full-length on a major label (an often overlooked fact: 1997's Dude Ranch was a joint release on indie Cargo and major MCA, subsidiary to Universal Music Group—an important distinction when considering the money accessible to them very early on), but ultimately the launching point for their soon-to-be massive moment. Enema birthed "All The Small Things," the song that would place them on a mainstream platform; it rivaled the boy bands they spent most of their time mocking, eventually inspiring a certain golden age of mall punk music. Warped Tour went from punk to pop-punk lightning quick.
1m
45m
22m
2m
8m
20m
5m
44m
20m
20m
20m
20m
21m
42m
46m
20m
2m
1m
1m
2m
46s
1m
5m
2m
2m
1m
1m
20m
21m
20m
21m
20m
13m
1m
21m
1m
8m
41m
2m
2m
6m
20m
20m
3m
2m
12m
20m
9m
6m
2m
24m
1m
24m
30s
3644s
20m
2m
20m
5m
2m
2m
21m
1m
41s
1m
1m
1m
3m
3m
3m
2m
9m
2m
2m
6m
1m
1h 9m
1h 29m
1m
41m
2m
3m
22m
22m
1m
45m
23m
45m
22m
1m
22m
2m
45m
41m
42m
22m
45m
44m
22m
3m