Some will call me sacrilegious. Some will call me pretentious. Some will claim that I’m “just jealous of their fame.” Some will probably tell me to back off. But I do not care. blink-182 is an absolute disgrace. They are what 14-year-old white boys who consider themselves “edgy” and “hate what’s on the radio” should be listening to. They are something everyone should grow out of and leave far, far behind.

Where do I even begin talking about how much I hate this band? Perhaps Tom Delonge? He is, bar none, one of the worst lead vocalists of all-time. His whiny, angsty voice is everything people hate about pop-punk, but even worse, because during live performances, he borders on tone-deaf. Listen to the live clip of “Always” I posted below at your own risk; it is absolutely horrendous, bordering on inhuman. In the first pre-chorus, he doesn’t even attempt to hit the harmonies present in the studio version because they are very clearly out of his range. Upon listening, it becomes apparent that voice correction and pitch-shifting are key elements in blink’s arsenal, which seems a bit anti-punk and commercial, don’t you think?

You really haven’t heard anything, though, until you’ve experienced Delonge and Mark Hoppus, bassist and occasional vocalist, harmonizing together. It’s utterly appalling. (skip to 4:15)

And if you haven’t already hung yourself, have this clip of Delonge singing(?) “Feeling This” (skip to 1:26)

Now that we’ve covered the vocals, let’s discuss the lyrics. Here’s an excerpt from “Feeling This”: “The air is so cold and low / let me go in her room / I love all the things you do / I wanna take off her clothes” my god, it’s like the Goo-Goo Dolls and Green Day, two of the worst bands of our generation, had a lovechild—rather, spawned a child from hell. The first verse of “The Rock Show” perfectly describes the person you should never, ever associate yourself with: “Hanging out behind the club on the weekend / acting stupid, getting drunk with my best friends / I couldn’t wait for the summer at the Warped Tour / I remember it’s the first time that I saw her there” Yay, a drunk bro who goes to Warped Tour! What could possibly be better? (side note: Warped Tour, and every band who plays on the circuit, should be outgrown by the age of 16, including Streetlight Manifesto, who somehow manage to make ska even less appealing).

Also—can we take a paragraph to appreciate how terrible of a person Delonge is? He calls his side-project, Angels and Airwaves, an “art project [that approaches] larger human themes and tackles them in different mediums,” which… no. That’s a new level of pretentiousness and self-indulgence. At the age of 25, he wrote a

song about a guy who bangs his sister, and at 26, a song called “F*ck a Dog,” which, yes, is indeed about having anal sex with a canine. These are things one would expect to come out of a 14-year-old boy who writes “wieners” on his friends’ graphing calculators in geometry class, but nope! Mid-20s it is! He said blink shows are like “an ascension to heaven,” and proclaimed, “This is the best music made in decades” about blink’s debut album (spoiler alert: it’s terrible). It’s all quite disgusting.

Putting aside Delonge, though, the band is still excruciating. The fact that they have an album called “Take Off Your Pants and Jacket” (figure it out if you haven’t already) and an album called “Dude Ranch,” and a song where they just repeat “cuss words” over and over again in the most grating, try-hard way possible (again, think of the 14-year-old boy) and the fact that their best song features f*cking Yelawolf and contains the lyric “Your hands were like birds as they flew from the coop / up my back they would climb just as I came unglued” (because smelly, obnoxious, mud-covered birds are exactly what I like to think about before having sex)... it’s all too much to handle. There is nothing enjoyable about blink-182, and if you think there is, you’re an idiot. Go mourn Prince’s death instead of listening to this sh*t.