FUSE TV - 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.