Blink-182 has long been adult men doing teenage cosplay, and it would have been naïve of me 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 queasiness was replaced by an odd relief that such so-called “jokes” didn’t feel so normal anymore. They felt, to borrow a word from Rodrigo, cringe. The band’s assumption that these are the sorts of things young people find funny in 2023 just made it sound behind the times, like it was speaking an old dialect that had fallen out of fashion.
The best new Blink-182 song I heard all year wasn’t a Blink-182 song at all. It was “Hollywood Baby” by the digitally savvy jesters 100 gecs, a hydraulic Monster Truck of a pop-punk song with a chorus featuring Dylan Brady’s best and most reverently nasal DeLonge impression: “I’m gowww-ing crayyy-zeee, little tiny Hollywood bay-beee.” It has that rib-shaking, volcanically blown-out sound that I still love about the best Blink-182 songs, but I can enjoy it mindlessly without having to stifle any kind of internal nausea to sing along to every word.
On their thrill-a-second, blissfully silly album “10,000 gecs,” Brady and Laura Les are equal-opportunity absurdists; they don’t need to punch down to get their jokes off. Like the most benevolent stoners, they know that there is an infinite quantity of things to laugh at in this world that do not come at the expense of other people. Such as: What if a little frog showed up at 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, unserious and also my favorite album of the year. When I try to articulate why, I keep coming back to something that the critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote in her review of it: “It’s a re-evaluation of the most déclassé and dunderheaded rock genres that roiled the 2000s, positing that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be terrific music. 100 gecs are speaking to and for the regressive ids of us all; dumb [expletive] should be inclusive too.”
That was the energy I sensed in the room when 100 gecs played a sold-out show in Brooklyn this April, easily the most jubilant concert I saw all year. Brady and Les thrashed in neon wizard robes; someone crowd-surfed an inflatable alligator. The audience was diverse, friendly and full of people of all genders having the time of their lives.
Everyone deserves an opportunity to turn their brains off now and then, 100 gecs seem to be saying, but it’s hard to enjoy something mindlessly when you have the creeping sense that you’re the butt of the joke. That’s not the case when I’m listening to “10,000 gecs,” though, and it certainly wasn’t that night at the show. We weren’t laughing at anyone in particular, but best believe we were laughing.