Trivia / blink-182

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• Approval of God: A.J. McLean of Backstreet Boys was quoted in the 20th anniversary pop-up trivia video for "I Want It That Way" that he loved the parody of the video that blink did for "All The Small Things."
• Chart Displacement: They had five #1 Alternative hits: "All the Small Things", "I Miss You"... and their reunion singles "Bored to Death", "Edging", and "One More Time". The former was their first single without Tom, and the latter two became their longest running chart toppers due to him rejoining the band.
• Costume Backlash: Tom has said that the band going naked for the "What's My Age Again?" music video was "only funny for like ten minutes", and they hate how the marketing focused on that.
  "We were so naïve that we would run around naked, but they'd make it all glossy and put it on posters and make it look like we really were some kind of erotic boy band or some shit."
• Creative Differences / Creator Breakdown: Twice into what led Delonge to leave. Get some popcorn for this:
  • Delonge was already suffering a semi breakdown around 2001 following 9/11, having to deal with his brother going off to the Iraq War and health issues resulting from a disk breaking from his spine, which resulted in him taking medication and giving out the infamous exaggeration comments he became known for. All of that stress lead to Delonge forming Box Car Racer, a Darker and Edgier project that would allow him to vent out his frustrations (as the music didn't sound "blink friendly") and to expand as a musician. The result of it lead to Mark Hoppus becoming rather offended and hurt by Delonge making a project without him (as Travis was hired so Delonge didn't need to get a session drummer), which lead to a strain in their relationship. While Tom's "experiment" would lead to the eventual untitled/self-titled album, that strain, alongside Delonge's desire to go be with his wife and daughter would lead to him leaving the band and blink-182 entering their four year hiatus.
  • The second time Delonge left was less of the breakdown-ish and more creativity wise, as Delonge was again trying to expand on his talents in his endeavors while Hoppus and Barker were wanting to continue blink-182. Depending on who you ask, Delonge either quit the band once again because of this or he was kicked out by Hoppus and Barker because of lack of focus. While most people sided with Hoppus and Barker (in particular Hoppus) when they claimed Delonge only did blink just for the money, Delonge himself claims that Hoppus and Barker were going to make him sign a contract that would restrict most of his projects he had planned.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Dogs Eating Dogs had this reception from the band themselves. After his departure, Tom ragefully explained how difficult the EP's production was as he had to produce it by himself, whereas Mark only did his parts in 11 days, as he moved to England at the time. Keep in mind that while Tom knew how to produce, he was basically a newbie compared to what he had learned, especially from his late mentor Critter.
  • Similarly, in a 2021 interview done for the tenth anniversary of Neighborhood's release, Tom has stated that he now thinks he got "too heavy-handed" when it came to giving Neighborhoods a distinguishable style from the previous albums, noting that Mark and Travis were "probably rightfully hesitant" to it.
  • While they're far more fond of it now and the song itself is something they always loved to play, the music video for "What's My Age Again?" briefly fell victim to this due to the fact that it was more or less responsible for establishing the "irreverent punk rock band that does nothing but sing about sex" persona that went to follow the band on mainstream media at the time.
  • Averted with Travis Barker's previous stint with The Aquabats!; while there was previous beef due to the circumstances of Travis leaving the Aquabats, both bands are back on amicable terms to the point where the Bats opened for the last two shows on blink's reunion tour.
  • Whilst there's no indication any members of the band feel this way, Tom joked on the Enema of the State II DVD, that he can never do anything like run for political office, because the stuff he's gotten up to as a member of Blink-182 would provide easy ammo to destroy his campaigns.
  • Some of their reactions to their older material can be seen as a mild version of this. Being pigeonholed as a joke band/simply a pop-punk band made it considerably more difficult to be taken seriously by a lot of their fans and the media when they tried branching out on later albums and their side projects. When it comes to live shows, Tom would prefer that the setlists were comprised mostly of songs from the Untitled album onward, while Mark knows riots are likely to ensue if they didn't play the more popular older songs. It's a strange balance they have to keep.
• Development Hell:
  • The "blinkumentary", a documentary about the band's return and the production of Neighborhoods, had gone on with development for a few years. The last anyone has heard of it from the band itself was them getting to watch a near final cut of the film... then nothing. Perhaps it's now on the The Shelf of Movie Languishment, perhaps their former label didn't approve, maybe the band themselves just thought it really sucked.
    • One of the original directors stated that "the band buried it", implying the band shut down the project.
  • As soon as shortly after the release of California's deluxe edition, Mark (and by an extent, Travis and Matt) constatly boasted and hyped the release of Nine and how it will, as usual, be "an experimental release" and the like... but yet they kept delaying it each time. After all the delays, Nine finally was released in September of 2019.
• Executive Meddling: Take Off Your Pants and Jacket was basically complete by the time the band had a meeting with their then-label manager, but the latter wanted happier singles versus the moodier songs the band had recorded. Incensed, Mark drove home and wrote "The Rock Show" in 15 minutes, while Tom did the same with "First Date". In an unusual case, this turned out for the better, given that the two songs became the most popular ones from the album and ended up among the band's highest-charting singles.
• Flip-Flop of God:
  • Ask any of the members of the band why Tom left and you'll get three different answers. Ask the same person at two different points and you might get two.
  • "Adam's Song" got hit with this twice.
    • Tom says the song is about suicide. Mark says the song is actually an anti-suicide song. Neither of them has backed down on this.
    • Why did they write it? Did they get a letter from someone before they committed suicide and wanted to prevent more suicides? Did Mark actually write it because he was lonely in life and had no one to go home to after tours? No one seems to actually know.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • This is the case with the demo tapes Flyswatter and Demo #2. It's also the case with several tracks on their third demo tape, "Buddha", because the CD release of that demo replaced some of the tracks with others: specifically, the demo version of "Degenerate" as well as the tracks "The Family Next Door" and "Transvestite" are exclusive to the cassette.
  • The three tracks from They Came to Conquer... Uranus are available on CD, but not on a release featuring the whole EP. You need either the US "Dick Lips" CD single, which has "Wrecked Him" and "Zulu", or the Australian "Wasting Time" and "Dammit" singles, which include either track respectively. The early version of "Waggy" from the EP, however, can only be found on one CD: a 1996 charity release called "MOM: Music For Our Mother Ocean".
  • The original releases of Buddha and Cheshire Cat that barred the original "Blink" name (before the band added the "-182" suffix) are pretty hard to find, and have become rare collector's items as a result.
• Life Imitates Art: Delonge wrote the song "Stay Together For the Kids" in regards to his own experiences with his parents' divorce. Years later in 2019 (eighteen years after the song's release in 2001), he and his wife divorced, with the only saving grace being that their children were old enough to not suffer the heavy consequences of it.
• One-Take Wonder: Mark recorded the vocals for "Adam's Song" in one take.
• Promoted Fanboy: They were all pretty excited to have Robert Smith sing on "All of This", but Mark Hoppus especially fits this category: In high school, he was a big enough Cure fan that he attended his classes dressed like Robert Smith, complete with makeup.
• Rarely Performed Song: For a time, after 2009, the band retired "Adam's Song" from their concerts due to the death of their close friend DJ AM, who succumbed to his drug addiction. Nine years later though, they brought the song back during their residency at Las Vegas, with Hoppus explaining that they saw it in a new light.
• Referenced by...:
  • In the The Loud House comic story "Luna's New Threads", there's a poster with a smiley resembling the one used by blink-182 since their self-titled album in Luna and Luan's room.
  • "All The Small Things" has become an unofficial anthem for the National Hockey League's Colorado Avalanche. When they won the 2022 Stanley Cup the band congratulated them, and Mark was there to lead a sing-along during the next season opener.
  • "What's My Age Again?" is prominently featured in the trailer for the Clone High revival, nodding back to the first season's copious use of Pop Punk in its soundtrack and the fact that the show originally aired in and was set during the early 2000s.
• Renamed to Avoid Association: They were forced to change their name from just "Blink" by an Irish group of the same name.
• Similarly Named Works: They have two different songs called "Voyeur".
• Throw It In!:
  • The drums at the beginning of "Feeling This" were made up by Travis on the spot; the others loved it and kept it in. Also, at the end of the song, the vocals were supposed to fade out with the instruments, but they were left in due to a mistake on the engineer's part. The band said, "Just leave it... it sounds like The Beach Boys."
  • That "ah!" you hear halfway through "Cynical"? That was the sound of Travis messing up his drum fill, but the band decided to keep it in.
    • Bonus fact: this is actually the first time you hear him say something on an album (aside from his backing vocals in "Down" and "Obvious").
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tom's solo album To the Stars was originally intended to be a blink-182 album, but following the fallout with Mark and Travis, he crafted it into his solo project.
  • Even before that, in the Angels & Airwaves documentary Start the Machine, Tom stated the songs off of the band's debut album We Don't Need to Whisper were going to be songs for a potential blink record. Imagine how interesting it would have sounded like if songs like "The Adventure", "The Gift", or "It Hurts" were in the blink sound.
  • Tom's character Poet was going to originally be a part of the blink music, as a sort of trickster character. Let that sink in.
  • Around 2017, Blink was supposed to go on a joint tour with Linkin Park, called Blinkin Park. Due to Chester Bennington's untimely death that year, they were forced to cancel.
  • Mark originally wrote "What's My Age Again?" as a joke song (a la "Family Reunion") before deciding the riff had more potential as a sincere song.
  • "All of This" was planned to be the fifth single from the band's self-titled/untitled album, but it was never materialised due to the band entering a four-year hiatus. Supposedly, M. Night Shyamalan was interested in directing a music video for the song, featuring as he said "vampires".
  • "I Really Wish I Hated You" from Nine was originally a duet with Miley Cyrus.
• Working Title:
  • Enema of the State was titled Viking Wizard Eyes, Wizard Full of Lies during the recording sessions. This title can be found as a hidden text in the internal spine of the album's CD release.
  • Take Off Your Pants and Jacket had a number of planned titles that also involved a play on words, including If You See Kay (based on the spelling of "fuck") and Genital Ben (a Shout-Out to the children's novel Gentle Ben and its titular character). The final title was suggested by guitar tech Larry Palm to Tom, based on how he witnessed a mother tell her drenched child to "take off his pants and jacket" at a snowboarding lodge on a rainy day.
  • The original title for "What's My Age Again?" was "Peter Pan Complex", but was rejected by the record label for two reasons. The first is that Disney owned the rights to the Peter Pan franchise and they intended to avoid a lawsuit, and the second is that the label feared that radio listeners would be unable to request the song due to the title not appearing in the lyrics.
  • "All the Small Things" had the working title 'Babycakes-Buttermuffin', and the early demos just listed it as 'Ramones-style song', due to the "na-na-na" in there as a nod to The Ramones.
• Written-In Infirmity: Mark's voice sounds especially strained in "Dammit", because smoking and lack of vocal warm-ups was giving him problems. He actually likes the sound, finding it "raw and cool".

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