Pop-Punk Has Long Been Funny, but Who Gets to Make the Jokes?
“Turn This Off!” is a pummeling, 23-second novelty song on “One More Time,” the most recent album from the pop-punk juggernaut Blink-182, and the first in 12 years to feature the singer and guitarist Tom DeLonge. “If you’re too offended by these words,” DeLonge shouts in his vowely, oft-imitated Southern California drawl, “then please [expletive] off.” His rapid-fire verse concludes in a crude joke, perhaps the only word of which I can quote in this publication is “proctologists.” When “One More Time” came out in October, listening to this song prompted me to feel a specific kind of discomfort as familiar as the wallpaper on my teenage bedroom: knowing you’re supposed to laugh at a joke you don’t find funny.
Blink-182 was my favorite band for a decent chunk of my adolescence, and I felt for them a fervent, unconditional kind of adoration that today gets called “stanning.” I loved the tuneful irreverence of their voices, their goofball defiance and the way their three simple instruments fused into a sound as huge as the sky on a cloudless California day.
And yet there were always lyrics, stage banter and sometimes entire songs that made that particular queasiness rise in my throat.
The ones that went, “Your mom’s a whore” or “The state looks down on sodomy.” They were the sort of jokes the boys at school made, too — homophobic, sexist, brutishly derogatory — that I knew I was supposed to laugh at if I wanted to fit in.
