This Song is About You
S. is fat now, which is weird to think about because it means that I am also fat now. We are not the same fat, but we’re the same amount of aged, which means that our bodies have shifted, filled, and expanded. In high school we were both skinny and in a band together. I was in the band because I thought playing music would save me, but I didn’t ever want to practice. He was in the band because he was committed to pop punk. He really believed in the message of Blink 182 and Taking Back Sunday. He really believed in the whiny voices of white men grieving over lost love, even as they were entering into new relationships, also known as future fodder for songs of lost love. I hated S.’s music taste because it felt performative, but being in a band with him made sense to me. The band ended because I did not practice enough, and probably also because I hated S.’s music taste.
So here we are now, both fat, both living adult lives. Facebook tells me that he does something expensive in finance. Facebook tells him nothing about me because I cannot imagine he has looked. The things I wonder about him now are: does he still love the same music he loved when he was in high school? Does he think he is fat like how I think I am fat? Does he run, or does he go to the gym at all? Does he have time to think about art, or is it not a concern for him? We are both married now, and part of marriage means that you are together with someone else, thinking less about art than you did when you were sad and a teenager.
In a way, S.’s love of Blink 182 makes sense, though it was anomaly when we were high school teenagers. Because Blink 182 became popular when we were 13, by the time we were 16, Blink 182 was classified by most of us as music for kids, even though the men making it were older than we were when we wrote off Blink 182.
This was where my envy for S.’s love of childish music came in. S. did not care, at a time when it meant everything to care. It was about image for S., but it was about image as comfort — music divorced from its marketing, from how it was presented to us, drilled down to just a simple idea of sad songs for sad people who would soon realize they were normal and happy.
A song called “I’m Sorry” closes out Blink 182’s breakout album Dude Ranch. Like every other Blink 182 song, it is about a breakup, or it is about getting older. They are ultimately the same idea, with the same set of resolutions. Tom DeLonge addresses an anonymous “you,” encouraging this “you” to dust “yourself” off and try again. To get older and grow up. Maybe he is singing to his teenage self, or maybe he is singing to an ex. At the end of the song, Mark Hoppus, the less nasal of the two Blink 182 singers, comes in, singing “I’m sorry” over and over. It’s an odd moment, imagining the band facing thousands of fans, Hoppus telling them he’s sorry. Is he apologizing to them? For them? For himself? It doesn’t matter. The sentiment: I understand what you are going through and I see you applies to every single possible scenario contained in those sorrys. It is what made Blink 182 popular with teenagers. Here were these adult men, living out a juvenile fantasy that was far enough away from actual juvenile living that it could come across as commiseration where there normally was none.
I always imagined S. wanting us to cover the song. Us playing it on a stage. Imagining who he was saying sorry to. It seemed like it would have been an awkward but honest moment. A genuine teenage experience designed to be regretted by the time we went to college. It’s telling now that I could not imagine myself wanting to cover the song. To do so would have involved buying into something so awkward. It involved committing. It involved identifying with a song and sound that I felt I had aged out of, even as I tried to assist S. in keeping it going.
“I’m Sorry” devolves into feedback, and then a brief, dumb skit where Mark Hoppus pees a whole lot after drinking too many beers, and then invites his dog to drink the pee. The dog drinks the pee.