Back in the mid '90s when Blink 182 were an insignificant pop punk band singing about apple shampoo at sophomore basement parties, they enjoyed the kind of respect that accompanies a total lack of success. Skip to 1999: Enema Of The State has just shot into the Billboard top ten and the trio are now enduring the vicious hostility that accompanies success. Yet it wasnt the soaring album sales and main stage festival slots that bothered their detractors the most. Instead, Blinks combination of whiny teenage angst and outright stupidity was considered an insult to punks long-standing love affair with politics and social issues. Eventually, after shipping more than ten million albums and touring the world countless times, the frazzled band did something no one saw coming: made a dark, intense, serious record for adults then promptly split up. The upside was that, having expanded their pop punk template to include atmospheric keyboards and a guest slot for The Cures Robert Smith, their farewell effort suggested there was more to the band than mere mother issues and masturbation jokes. Ok, so we still werent going to their shows in the hope of an intellectual debate, but at least the flappy penis video for What's My Age Again? no longer defined them either.
