Blink-182 are eternal adolescences, writing songs of teenage heartbreak, first love, dicking around with your friends, and… dicks. As is often the case with art released in the past, many songs that blink-182 wrote and released throughout the ’90s and early ’00s simply would not go down well in the PC-savvy climate of 2018.
In celebration of our favourite free club night, Melbourne’s LOUD Thursdays, which goes down at Perseverance Hotel in Fitzroy every week and pays homage to all those classic indie, punk, and alt-rock jams you still know all the words to, here are eight of the most hilariously un-PC songs in the blink-182 catalogue.
DUMPWEED
Together with Dysentery Gary, which bemoans how “girls are such a drag”, Dumpweed is perhaps the catchiest non-single on the massive Enema Of the State, and one of the two most sexist tunes on the record. “I need a girl that I can train” is the hook to this song, and it’s hard not to imagine a million hot takes and widespread Twitter fire if it was to come out this year.
“That’s all about wishing you had a girl you could train”, Tom DeLonge said of the song. “I remember writing the song thinking about my dog. You can train the dog to sit, to be quiet, to be a good dog. But you can’t teach a girl to do anything. So I thought that’d be cool to write a song about…If only you had a girl that you could train like a dog, that’d be cool because then she could never make you mad, and she would never be a woman. And women are just a whole different species. So that song was written [like] ‘As if…’”
DYSENTERY GARY
Cause I love your little motions
You do with your pigtails
What a nice creation
Worth another night in jail
Hmmm. Lusting after an underage girl, with the implication that to sleep with her would be worth the jail-time. Also, that the jail-time would only be one night.
The second-last line of this song is also “Your mum’s a whore”, just to add to the offensiveness.
VOYEUR
In which Tom DeLonge sits in a tree with his pants down and watches a girl get changed through her window. ‘Nuff said.
I’m out of luck ’cause the shades are pulled down
I’ve seen everything there is to be shown
I followed her all the way home
I can’t be too cool in a tree with my pants down
The air is cold and I’ve got splinters in my feet
BEN WAH BALLS
Incest, toilet humour, and the implication that using anal sex toys makes one gay. This track from their first album-proper Cheshire Cat is so silly that it can’t be taken too offensively, but then again, that excuse can be used for this entire band.
FUCK A DOG
Here’s verse one.
I want to fuck a dog in the ass
He wants to fuck a dog in the ass
I want to fuck a dog
That’s right kids
I tried to fuck your mom in the ass
Tried to fuck your dad in the ass
Could only find the dog
And its ass
It gets worse. Or better, depending on your take on the world.
FAMILY REUNION
“Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tit fart turd and twat.” That’s the entirety of this classic song (well, almost, depending on the version you listen to), which was actually released to radio as a promotional single for Enema Of The State, the joke being of course that no commercial radio format would ever play this.
I’M GAY
Mark Hoppus — a decidedly straight man who often jokes about being gay for effect — wrote this impromptu song, the entirety of which goes “I’m gay, so what? Don’t judge my butt.”
HAPPY HOLIDAYS, YOU BASTARD
“This song is the one that really pisses your parents off.”, said Mark Hoppus of the song. “I wrote this song on Christmas Eve, because I was way behind on wrapping presents, and rather then take carer of the problem, I picked up a guitar and wrote a fucked up song about it. I finished wrapping them at about 3 in the morning.”
A true Christmas miracle.
