The phone calls between Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker, and Tom DeLonge that took place a few months ago have sort of borne fruit: blink-182 will present an award at this Sunday night’s Grammys, presumably while wearing clothes and not playing music. Hooray? Also on the telecast now: performances by M.I.A., Neil Diamond, Robin Thicke, Stevie Wonder, and a Bo Diddley tribute featuring Buddy Guy, B.B. King, John Mayer, and Keith Urban. Full list of performers after the jump! It’s a long one, and I’m starting to think that this year’s telecast is going to be way heavy on the blurted-out, pre-commercial-break omnibus lists of winners.
It’s been four years since Blink-182 petered out after their peculiar Robert Smith phase (which was not terrible, but just something of a death rattle). In the interim Mark Hoppus has been blogging heavily and producing generic pop-punk, while Tom DeLonge has dedicated himself to exploring the deepest depths of nauseating self-importance. It seemed for a while that the once fantastically crude duo would never reconcile their divergent life paths. But! According to Hoppus’ latest blog post there may actually be a glimmer of hope for a second Belle Époque of fart jokes.
Three years ago today Blink 182 officially announced their indefinite hiatus, thus ending a golden era of genuinely fun pop music. Commercial rock has been tragically devoid of dick jokes and scatological humor since their departure, and the new wave of punky pop bands (aka emo aka Those Dudes) just doesn’t have the same kind of sarcastic swagger that Blink 182 possessed in such abundance. They were by no means great musicians, but if you were 13 years old in 2000 and too misanthropic for boy bands, yet still immature enough to enjoy sodomy jokes, they were pitch perfect. Let’s examine some of their finer moments.
From Pitchfork to Artforum, publications love to pad out their year-end coverage with Top Ten lists from musicians, whether world-famous or positively subterranean, but perhaps only Billboard could bring together Greg Dulli and Katharine McPhee. Instead of reprinting them all–there are many, and do you really care that the dudes from Vampire Weekend also liked that Panda Bear record an awful lot?–we’ve included our “Top Three Lists From Billboards‘s Top Tens” after the jump, along with our “The Good,” “The Bad,” and “The Whaaaa?” wrap-up, so as not to spoil the fun.
– Angels and Airwaves/Blink 182 frontman Tom DeLonge takes a potshot at irritable Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, saying that he was actually the first person to say that his band’s album would be “the best of the last 20 years.” More »
