Review: Blink-182 wedges a little vulnerability in with a LOT of vulgarity. Did it work?

Over the course of exactly 72 seconds on Friday night at Spectrum Center in Charlotte, Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus put a lump in fans’ throats — maybe even goosed a tear or two out of some — while teeing up 1999 pop-punk hit-turned-suicide prevention anthem “Adam’s Song.”

“I wrote this song when I was at a point in my life when I didn’t feel like I wanted to keep going,” the band’s co-lead singer and bassist explained, soberly, to the sold-out crowd. “We recorded it, and this song saved my life.

“Then a couple years ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.”

It’s a well-known story, among fans: He was told in April 2021 that he had stage 4 diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, underwent chemotherapy, lost his hair, felt like he was dying, sometimes wanted to die. But, he says, “this band ... and all of you saved my life a second time. This tour, and these shows, and these songs have healed me more than any medicine, more than any doctor.”

In those 72 pre-”Adam’s Song” seconds, Hoppus demonstrated a level of maturity and perspective absolutely befitting a guy who’s 51, a dad, and a cancer survivor.

But other than that fleeting, touching, grown-up moment, pretty much everything that came out of the mouths belonging to him and to bandmate Tom DeLonge (who is 47) between songs on Friday night required nothing more than a middle-school boy’s intellect — and a borderline disturbing fascination with male genitalia.

These weren’t just run-of-the-mill profanities. Blink drummer Travis Barker’s 19-year-old son Landon had those covered, littering the banter in his short opening set with generically-used f-bombs.

No, this was a next-level indecency that would have made George Carlin blush, at times so off-the-wall that it couldn’t have been scripted.

On the one hand, I wish this wasn’t the type of publication for which I need to practice responsible censorship, just so you could gape at all of the many examples I collected. On the other, I’d probably wind up feeling like I needed a shower if forced to type out the full barrage of sophomoric insults and “jokes” Hoppus and DeLonge traded, almost relentlessly.

A lot of it not only seemed like a stream-of-consciousness vomiting of obscenity. They practically admitted it was such!

Fifteen minutes into their 95-minute set, after ripping through 2003’s “Feeling This” (a song, coincidentally, about sex), Hoppus told DeLonge — apropos of absolutely nothing — “Your mom’s underwear look like she washed her car tires with them.”

To which DeLonge replied: “Your dad’s (censored) looks like the stick that Moses had that turned into a snake and the apocalypse happened somewhere in the Old Testament.” By the way, I checked that three times, and as hard as it might be to believe, that’s an exact quote. “I don’t know,” DeLonge said after stumbling through his comeback. “I was trying to come up with something. It’s weird that that’s what came into my head.”

There were no less than 20 different, distinct, dirty exchanges like this on Tuesday night.

They included bizarre references to everything from Pornhub to SpongeBob to Venmo; to us — the crowd packed into the Charlotte Hornets’ home — as “looking ... more like the Charlotte Hornies”; to a rig that would pull Barker and his drum kit up into the air via chains as “Travis’s Sex Dungeon”; and to a long-haired, bearded crew member as Jesus Christ, who, DeLonge preached, “he will fill your stomach, he will cure your disease, he will spread your (censored) like the Red Sea.”

I truly am only scratching the surface here. But I do need to mention at least a few things about the actual musical portion of the evening. So...

As pretty much every fan of Blink-182 knows, the current tour marks a reuniting of Barker, DeLonge and Hoppus for the first time since DeLonge stepped away more than eight years ago. (Blink brought Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba with them to PNC Music Pavilion in July 2019 for the “Enema of the State 20th anniversary tour,” but this was the legacy lineup’s first appearance here in Charlotte since 2011.)

Friday’s show marked the 38th stop on the current tour out of 39 in North America, and took place on a very busy night uptown, with country star Luke Combs doing the first of his two concerts for 50,000 fans at Bank of America Stadium a mere eight blocks away.

Though most of my focus thus far has been on the co-lead singers/clowns up front, in a way Barker — who said zero words all night, in stark contrast to Hoppus and DeLonge’s blabbering — is set up to be the center of attention: Long before the trio even stepped on stage, Barker’s drums were lowered from the rafters to oooohs and ahhhhs, his massive kit seeming to have two or three times as many high hats and three or four times as many snares as a normal one.

And once he took his seat, the 47-year-old husband of Kourtney Kardashian spent the night punishing the pieces of his instrument, his tattooed upper torso slick with sweat, his arms a flurry of motion that sometimes made him look like an octopus.

All that said, it does seem as though DeLonge and Hoppus treat Barker kind of like a pet. They refer to him a lot while bantering amongst just the two of themselves, but only really interact with him to do things like wrap a towel around his head (as Hoppus did during “Violence”) so fans can watch Barker play “blindfolded.” Or to hand him a bottle of water and mop sweat off of his body following a particularly aggressive drum fill (like DeLonge did after “Always”).

But Barker’s combination of speed, power and showmanship — the way he can make it almost look like he’s dancing one minute, then like he’s a boxer hitting a heavy bag the next — can lend sonic heft and edge to some of the band’s more lightweight songs, while also simply being extraordinarily transfixing.

Hoppus and DeLonge, meanwhile, exude plenty of energy and enthusiasm, skipping, hopping and jumping around the stage (perhaps with a little less spring in their step than the old days) through hits like “The Rock Show” and “What’s My Age Again?,” songs they recorded nearly half a lifetime ago.

Their voices are also showing some age, although in Hoppus’s case I doubt his cancer helped, and in DeLonge’s, it’s slightly harder to judge how much his has changed because he still apparently covers by using Auto-Tune.

At heart, however, they’re still 16-year-old boys who are non-conforming goofballs on stage.

Sometimes the antics miss the mark, like after performing 2016 hit “Bored to Death”: Hoppus hastily explained that they wanted to give a fan a guitar, but that they’d given away two at their last show. “So I have a coupon for a free guitar,” he said. “It’s a real coupon,” DeLonge chimed. “I swear to God it’s real. I will mail you a guitar.” The coupon was handed down into the pit in the least-ceremonious, most-emotionless way possible, with Hoppus then blurting out, “Here’s a song,” to introduce “I Miss You.”

Other times, they nail it: Right before “What’s My Age Again?,” Hoppus announced, “We’re gonna act like this next song is the last song of the set. But it’s not. Regardless of whether you cheer, clap, leave, we don’t give a s---. It’s in our contract. We have to play three more songs.” Upon finishing that song, he shouted, “Thank you! We’ll see you next time! Bye-bye, everybody.” After a four-second pause, he yelled, “We’re back!” (I wish everyone would handle the standard encore this way.)

Hoppus nailed it with his message to Blink’s fans about how they helped him weather his cancer fight, too.

But I cannot express to you how jarring it was to have that kind of vulnerability wedged in with all that vulgarity. I mean, in the 20-plus other breaks for banter between songs, DeLonge and Hoppus made literally dozens of references to sex, or jokes about sex, or insults related to genitals.

They just don’t do serious, normally.

Hoppus even segued into one of their other heavy songs — “Stay Together for the Kids,” which touches on DeLonge’s childhood views of his parents’ divorce — by asking fans to turn on the flashlights on their cellphones and to hold them up ... and then quipping, “As long as we have them all up there — Hey Siri. Text Mom, ‘Let me see that (censored).’ Send.”

Who knows? Maybe they’re being ironic. Or maybe the disconnect is purposeful. Or maybe they truly are this immature. Or maybe it takes something as serious as cancer and almost dying for a band like Blink-182 to allow being serious during their show for a minute and 12 seconds.

Ultimately, I don’t think it probably matters.

What matters is that, thanks to good fortune, fans are able to continue to gather in an arena for Blink-182 shows; to watch the original members crank out high-caliber renditions of their greatest pop-punk hits; to enjoy, or cringe through, a parade of pornographic profanity.

And more than anything else, to celebrate the fact that Mark Hoppus was able to kick cancer directly in the (censored).

Blink-182’s setlist

1. “Anthem Part Two”

2. “The Rock Show”

3. “Family Reunion”

4. “Man Overboard”

5. “Feeling This”

6. “Reckless Abandon”

7. “Violence”

8. “Up All Night”

9. “Dysentery Gary”

10. “Dumpweed”

11. “Edging”

12. “Aliens Exist”

13. “Cynical”

14. “Happy Holidays, You Bastard”

15. “Stay Together for the Kids”

16. “Always”

17. “Down”

18. “Bored to Death”

19. “I Miss You”

20. “Adam’s Song”

21. “Ghost on the Dance Floor”

22. “What’s My Age Again?”

23. “First Date”

24. “All the Small Things”

25. “Dammit”