Blink-182 "Enema of the State" [1999]

Even upon revisiting Blink-182's disastrous "Enema of the State," it's hard to fathom how many bad ideas could fit within the confines of a single CD. Pasteurized, trite, cloying and assheaded, Blink-182 plays an overtly, self-consciously faux-hilarious brand of "punk-pop," a sub-genre which can best be described as the aural equivalent of McDonalds french fries: cheap, disgusting, fake and popular only if you're an immature, two-dimensional piece of shit. There were obviously plenty of such people around in 1999, and "Enema of the State" gave them every stupid, overreaching joke and idiotic vignette about girls they could cram up their collective butthole. Fuckin' a -- even Cake never reached this level of supreme punny preciousness. Which would be bad enough had they not sterilized the production throughout like they're performing in their mom's glowing white kitchen. Blink-182 are thus indeed committing pranks, just different ones than were clearly intended. Far from the intelligent insolence they think they're purveying, these guys engage in the criminal act of playing their instruments with anally-retentive precision but absolutely no heart, using cutesy phrases that are the very definition of banal; they're phony, insecure poseurs with a flat and trite worldview injecting aggressive mediocrity into the pop marketplace. In retrospect, we Americans were totally asking to get fucked with at the turn of the new millennium by listening to these guys.