Tag Archives: m

#791: Blink-182 – M+M’s

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This is a toughy. Only because I have no reason to gush over this song, I just think it’s very good. ‘M+M’s’ has been a mainstay in my music library for a long time. Some time after Christmas 2007, to be sort of exact ’cause that’s when I got Blink-182’s 2005 Greatest Hits compilation as a gift. ‘M+M’s’ is the second track on that collection. I can’t say it’s been there at major moment of my life, wasn’t the soundtrack to a specific moment in time. It’s just a damn catchy tune.

Like a lot of pop-punk tracks and Blink-182 songs in general, it’s about a boy-girl relationship. Hoppus sings about this girl he’s found that he’s got something good going with, and is determined not to mess things up. It seems that he can’t believe his luck, the way things are going for him, and the only thing now is to really seal the deal and ask her to be his girlfriend. The song contains a memorable riff by Tom DeLonge, thinking about it now he uses the same technique on some parts of ‘Dumpweed’, and the rhythm’s very tight too. Travis Barker may be the better drummer technically, but for his time in the band, original drummer Scott Raynor was a perfect fit for the song’s the band did back then.

‘M+M’s’ was Blink-182’s first ever single, released in 1995 when they were to bring out their debut album Cheshire Cat. They made a music video for it too, which you can see above. That is the censored version. The original had a scene at the end where the bandmembers and their ‘girlfriends’ have a shootout. Fake gunshot wounds and everything. That is below.

#790: Pezz (Billy Talent) – M & M

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Here it is. The return. The Music in My Ears is back with the M’s. Looking through my phone, there are a lot of fine songs to cover. Today, we start with ‘M & M’ – a track that was the first of 17 on Billy Talent’s first ever album, the one they made before they were even known as Billy Talent. For a few years, the band from Canada was called Pezz. They released an album in 1999 called Watoosh!. The group went away afterwards, changed the name and image and came back with a completely different style.

Around 2004/2005 I was really excited about Billy Talent. I was on their official website a lot of the time and trying to find where I could listen to their songs. Came across a fansite on Geocities which had a list of their rare tracks available in a very low quality and in .wmv format, and Watoosh! was on there. Only the links for ‘M & M’, ‘Fairytale’, ‘Nita’, and the cover of ‘New Orleans Is Sinking’ worked. I think that site was also where I found ‘Beach Balls’ too. If only I could remember that website’s name… As someone who discovered Billy Talent first and then found out that they made this years before, I was very surprised in the best way possible. The whole first ‘official’ Billy Talent album was perfect in my eyes as a nine-year-old. And those other songs convinced me that this was a band who couldn’t write a bad track.

‘M & M’ was inspired by the group of goth kids who used to come into the HMV store where singer Ben Kowalewicz worked back in the day and is something of an observation and a look into the minds of the kids of that subculture. It doesn’t seem to be too different from the whole emo scene of the mid-2000s. Kids still loathe their parents, they’re made fun of because of their extravagant makeup, and they have a fascination with death. Instead of the usual heavy approach that Billy Talent would be known for on their first album, Pezz take things on with, dare I say, a bit of playfulness. The group play with the tempo a bit more and add a bit of skip to their rhythms. It’s like a strange ska-punk song. And then halfway through the track takes a bit of a dramatic turn and ends in a way that you wouldn’t have guessed when it first started. That happens a lot throughout ‘Watoosh!’ I still really like that album to this day, even though the members of Billy Talent don’t acknowledge it that much.