Today (I started writing this on Friday and am now finishing it on Saturday) marked the tend of the podcast blink-155 and I have to admit that I didn't expect myself to get as emotional as I did. This was yet another example of me repeating to myself that something is "just a podcast" or "just a TV show" and for that reason, doesn't carry the emotional heft that real life event does. I was a fan of the show from day 1 and never missed a week of listening, but I wasn't actively engaged in the crazy Twitter community that formed around it and I didn't join the livestreams on Twitch. It was just something I liked, at least until the last episode started and I found myself getting wistful immediately.
blink-155 (yes, their name is subject to the same formatting principles as blink-182) was a good podcast because it was not like any other podcast I have listened to. It wasn't finely produced with interstitial music and heavily edited dialogue, and in fact they often mocked this through the format. It was long and meandering and it was about a lot of things, like media criticism, identity, aging, and evaluating online pop culture, while also managing to be about the band blink-182 most of the time. I think it's silly for me to try to explain the importance of the show any further because I'm underqualified, but I guess just know that it was really funny, endearing, smart, and unique.
I don't know that I can place my relationship to show alongside any other changes in my life (except for moving to Montreal and not knowing people here), so it's a little tough to think of exactly why the show hit the way it did, with my intense interest in the band it was about notwithstanding. Regardless, here's an attempt to do that:
As you aged as a blink fan, the band became this embarrassing from your past that you still carried with you. They were so big that everyone you knew had a frame of reference for them, but knew them as that juvenile fake punk band that everyone in class liked in 2001, rather than the identity-defining thing that you still loved. It was okay to pass off that love when you were 21, but with each passing year, it became less and less okay to still like them so much. Nobody would judge you to your face for it, but you could tell that everyone was taken aback by how much you knew about the members and how you clearly still kept tabs on what was going on with the band. The band wouldn't help your cause either, of course, as they either put out embarrassing radio rock or even more embarrassing attempts to reclaim their Southern California punk credibility in "return to form albums". To pile onto their awful later albums, they would also do sponsorship deals with Doritos and T-Mobile and all have terrible haircuts that signaled just how desperate they were. Then you would go see them, even though you knew that it wouldn't be as good as watching the "What's My Age Again?" video on your family's TV in the basement. They were play badly, as they always do, and it would seem embarrassing instead of charming, because they were almost 40, instead in their mid-20s. The new songs would always suck and you would be surrounded by bros and normies who wouldn't be friends with you while you were in high school, and they would all go crazy for the flying drum solo Travis did to dubstep. You would think about how much money you spent on tickets and how it wasn't really worth it. Then, Tom would start the distorted intro riff to "Dammit" and the band would play it insanely fast as their last song and you would remember exactly why you liked the band and it would feel like they were playing the song directly to you and you would remember that blink-182 was actually a gateway to lots of cooler things for you and that they are fun and they made you feel cool. Somehow blink-155, and especially the last episode, captured that feeling exactly.
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