Flying at Tree Level

Reblogged from oneweekoneband

oneweekoneband:

Against my own methodological rules, I am not sharing the video for “What’s My Age Again?” with you. Because, if this week has given you anything, I should hope that it gave y’all a chance to look at a really stupid, willfully irrelevant band in a new way. And it’s really really important to me to recontextualize “What’s My Age Again?” so that you can understand why I think it’s one of the most interesting, important, and beautiful songs that I’ve ever heard. And you can’t really do that while you’re looking at their balls.

I’ve written so much about “The Love Song of M. Allan Hoppus,” about the terror of aging, about the terror of feeling time slip between your fingers. Maybe “What’s My Age Again?” is just about what it’s like to be in your late-twenties, constantly annoying all your friends and family with prank calls. But consider this, and re-consider this song:

Originally Mark had called the song “Peter Pan Complex,” an allusion that is about more than a binary of maturity/immaturity. It is, again, an existential question, a hyper-awareness of placelessness and mortality. It is about the huge philosophical question of “growing up,” and how ”growing up” is a form of ascension into a mainstream sociality. Still not convinced? Consider this:

The label thought the song was a little too dark, too fatalistic, too capital-A Antisocial, and too sad. They made Mark scrap the title and replace it. They also made him add in the last few lines of the track. Okay, are you listening? Forget everything you know about this song and this video and this band, and look at the song Mark had intended to create:

I took her out, it was a Friday night
I wore cologne to get the feeling right
we started making out and she took off my pants, but then I turned on the TV
and that’s about the time she walked away from me
nobody likes you when you’re 23 and still more amused by TV shows
what the hell is ADD?
My friends say I should act my age, what’s my age again?
Then later on, on the drive home
I called her mom from a pay phone
I said I was the cops and your husband’s in jail, this state looks down on sodomy
and that’s about the time that bitch hung up on me
nobody likes you when you’re 23 and are still more amused by prank phone calls
what the hell is caller ID?
My friends say I should act my age, what’s my age again?
And that’s about the time she walked away from me
nobody likes you when you’re 23 and you still act like you’re in Freshman year
what the hell is wrong with me?
My friends say I should act my age, what’s my age again?

Without those final lines, it is a sad, weird, fatalistic, existential song, you know? But MCA wasn’t comfortable leaving audiences with a sad, weird, fatalistic track without consequence or reassurance, so they made him add a lighthearted end, a return to reality:

That’s about the time that she broke up with me
no one should take themselves so seriously
with many years ahead to fall in line, why would you wish that on me?
I never want to act my age, what’s my age again?

Like a shrug, who me?, an apolitical “boys-will-be-boys” moment which both reprimands (dumps) Mark for his poor behavior while removing any air of political consequence from his statement.

“What’s My Age Again?” is a conceptually brilliant song, a beautiful song. It’s a political song, too, (or, you know, at least as political as a gen-x alt single or Reality Bites, without getting credit for political consciousness). But it’s also kind of close to home, you know: I’m 23 and I spend all my time writing about blink-182. Needless to say, nobody likes me.