Little Victories

I Made A Linguistics Professor Listen To A Blink-182 Song And Analyze The Accent

Atlas Obscura - Blink-182 at the Whiskey in Los Angeles in 1996. (Photo: Daniel D'Auria/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Two decades have passed since pop punk exploded in the American music scene yet the strange voice of suburban teens still reverberates. The literal voice, the whiny, aggressively Californian vocals from the Clinton-era mutation of punk music that embraced skate and surf culture, mild angst, goofiness, and incredibly hooky, catchy music. It seems to still has a hold over anyone who was a teenager between 1993 and 2003: On Twitter you’ll see jokes made about the “pop punk voice" used by bands like the Offspring, New Found Glory, Avril Lavigne, and, especially, Blink-182, are a relic as strong as the Valley Girl voice.