Blink-182 has long been grown men doing teenage cosplay, and I was naive to expect growth from a group that made its name with a hit called “What’s My Age Again?” But at its concert this year, my giddiness was replaced by a strange relief that the so-called “jokes” no longer felt normal. They felt, to borrow a word from Rodrigo, turn around. The band’s assumption that these are the kinds of things that young people find funny in 2023 just makes it sound behind the times, like it’s speaking an old dialect that’s gone out of fashion.
The best new Blink-182 song I’ve heard all year isn’t a Blink-182 song. It’s “Hollywood Baby” by digitally savvy jesters 100 gecs, a hydraulic Monster Truck of a pop-punk song with a chorus featuring Dylan Brady’s best and most respectful DeLonge impression: “I’m gowww-ing crayyy-zeee, little Hollywood bay-beee.” It’s got that bone-shaking, volcanic-tossed sound that I still love about Blink-182’s best songs, but I can enjoy it carelessly without having to suppress any kind of internal nausea to sing every word.
On their thrill-a-second, wonderfully silly album “10,000 gecs,” Brady and Laura Les are equal-opportunity absurdists; they don’t need to punch to get rid of their jokes. Like the kindest stoners, they know that there are endless things to laugh about in this world that don’t come at the expense of other people. Like: What if a little frog showed up in a kegger? Can you imagine eating a burrito with Danny DeVito? What would be the funniest emoji for someone to put on their tombstone?
“10,000 gecs” is ridiculous, not serious and my favorite album of the year. When I try to say why, I keep coming back to something critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote about him analysis it: “It’s a re-examination of the most declassé and dunderheaded rock genres that rocked the 2000s, saying that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be great music. 100 gecs speak to and for the regressive ids in all of us; dumb [expletive] must also be inclusive.”
That was the energy I felt in the room when 100 gec played a sold-out show in Brooklyn this April, the funnest concert I’ve seen all year. Brady and Les thrashed in neon wizard robes; someone crowd-surfed on an inflatable alligator. The audience is diverse, friendly and full of people of all genders having the time of their lives.
Everyone deserves a chance to turn off their brains once in a while, 100 gecs seems to say, but it’s hard to enjoy something mindlessly when you have the creeping feeling that you are the butt of the joke. That’s not the case when I listen to “10,000 gecs,” however, and it certainly wasn’t that night at the show. We are not laughing in anyone in particular, but best believe we are laughing.
