The iPod connector to my car stereo broke, but since my car CD player can play MP3 CDs, I've been making 5-6 hour mixes to make the commute bearable. After realizing most of the ambient instrumental music I listen to at work wasn't going to cut it, I dug out a bunch of pop punk CDs that I haven't listened to since high school. One of them was Blink-182's Enema of the State, which I remember really liking 14 years ago. Does it hold up? No. Oh dear God no.
Before I get to the terrible, possibly destructive lyrics, I have a couple words on compression. In the audio world, a compressor takes a signal and boosts low frequencies while pushing down high frequencies, which is useful in making certain instruments stand out in a mix, especially if they share the same basic frequency range. By the late '90s modern music was in the midst of the Loudness War, where high profile releases were subjected to punishing compression that squeezed each instrument into it's own part of the spectrum so you could hear the snare just as loudly as the lead guitar. This destroyed any nuance and subtlety in a track with the goal of making it stand out when listening to it on the radio; nevermind the fact that radio stations have their own compressors to make sure the songs they play fall within their broadcast guidelines. The most famous instance of this is Metallica's widely panned St Anger album, which angered enough audiophiles to briefly become a news story (and the only interesting thing about the record).
Enema of the State was compressed so much as to become an oppressive, punishing listen. At first listen, the technique does its job, making the instruments push the speakers in a way that gets the listener's attention. After a couple plays, it becomes the aural equivalent of looking at a posterized photograph, where all the gradient and shading is gone, replaced by solid blocks of color.
Who was asleep at the switch when a line like "I need a girl that I can train" was recorded? The arc of the song goes something like this: Guy can't decide whether to break up with his girlfriend because she's crazy, and laments that he could sow his wild oats if only he could find a girl that obeyed him. It's not the subtlest song ever, and it reminds me a lot of the dickhead skaters at my high school, who considered themselves apart from the fray of meathead jocks yet indulged in the same moronic, misogynist behavior. It's not so much that they were terrible people-high school is a training ground for kids to mimic the terrible choices of their parents; it's that they honestly thought they were rebelling against a status quo, not fitting into a demographic that MCA Records exploited all the way to the bank.
This was back when TRL set the agenda for mainstream popular music. They had boy bands for the teen girls, rap for the kids who could drive, and R&B to soundtrack awkward makeout sessions. That left the most-white, mostly middle class droogs that didn't like rap but still tended to invite their girlfriends over to watch them play video games. Blink-182 became The Rock Band, just like Foo Fighters and later Queens of the Stone Age. Mainstream media only picks one white rock band to get behind at once, and their success is due to whatever shady backroom dealings happened between publicists, A&R, MTV and radio.
That kind of chicanery sounds like the only explanation for an album that sounds like it was focus grouped to death; or, fantastically, made in the future where its reception could be measured, then adjusted to achieve maximum exposure. With the money put behind the promotion of the album, nothing was left to chance: so why were the lyrics, ostensibly aimed at idiot kids, set somewhere between Vapid (which is understandable) and Awful? I'm not saying some 90s pop punk band owed it to anyone to be politically progressive, but opening a record with a song about the exact wrong way to handle a relationship, without once reflecting "hhmm maybe that was a bad way to deal with it", sounds like a damaging thing to do.
