This song was on their 1994 EP Cheshire Cat . It's not a bad little song, and was always one of those "this is for the people who knew us before Enema of the State" moments at concerts.

In my early teen days I always thought this song was really romantic. I still kind of think so! And Tom DeLonge's ratty voice in the chorus is a brilliant addition to the song.

Probably the best single they ever put out, if not their best song ever. You better believe it was exciting at concerts when the drums kicked in after the opening guitar riff. Right at that moment in the song on their live album Tom DeLonge screams "Take your pants off!" My best friend and I still say it every time we listen to the song.

People talk a big game about Nickelback's alleged "sense of humor" with that "Rockstar" song, but it's just not good enough for me. I want nudity and black dress socks. Now that's commitment.

What on earth can compete with this song? It's like Cheap Trick and The Monkees had a baby and it fell in a barrel of nuclear waste to become the ultimate mutant-powerful pop song.

And then they started taking themselves too seriously and things went steadily downhill...

I hear shades of Angels and Airwaves in the leaden chorus.

And then they started hanging out with Robert Smith and writing lyrics like "Hello there the angel from my nightmare, the shadow in the background of the morgue."

And since you can't sink any further than that, they had to call it quits. But where are they now? We all know what horror Tom DeLonge moved on to. Travis Barker now plays drums in his closet. And Mark Hoppus has a blog. I would say that it's sad they're not together anymore, but considering that they reached their peak in about 1999 with three chords and a handful of fart jokes, it's probably best to just leave the past behind us in this case.

In my pretentious high school days, I'd have never deigned to attend a show at an arena (the horror!), but there was a very special time in my life during which the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in The Woodlands, Texas, was the destination for all my concert needs. Which included Blink 182 and... Blink 182. Observing the crazed mayhem last week, I couldn't help but recall the similar, if not identical sentiment of my seventh-grade Blink 182 experience. How do the two concerts compare? Are the kids today getting everything they can out of their exuberant mall-emo/pop-punk life phase?

Band: Blink 182
Year: 2000
Age: 13
Company: My dad.
Concert vibe: Distinct mixture of sheer adolescent glee and misguided sense of anti-boy band edginess.
Stage decor: Giant flaming "FUCK." Yes, literally the letters F-U-C-K on fire suspended above the stage.
Stage banter: Scatological humor and lots of oral sex talk.

Whatever your feelings on Blink 182, it's hard to deny the goodwill they established by virtue of their utter and complete willingness—determination, even—to not take themselves seriously. At this point in their career, before the tragic self-importance set in, they did not—if I may—give a flaming fuck about serious music, nor about presenting themselves as serious musicians, which made their slapdash songs seem only appropriate. They were fun, and shallow, and they provided a convenient alternative to the Backstreet Boys. Their shows were sloppy, though not incompetent in the least, and they were even pretty cute. And, most importantly, you could shimmy around the non-violent mosh pit to every song because of their very specific, unrelenting pop-punk drum beat.

(A good example of typical charming Blink 182 stage banter.)

Band: Fall Out Boy
Year: 2007
Age: 19
Company: Maura and other music writers.
Concert vibe: Overwhelming excitement, minimal self-awareness, and undertones of prickly middle-school-girl bitchiness (seriously, I'll die of shock if I ever attend a mall emo show without witnessing a pack of girls rushing hurriedly around the venue in various states of distress).
Stage decor: Large platform for the drummer, huge monitor featuring innocuous animations for each song, moving sidewalks, lots of pyro, and a rad hideaway platform with stools for the acoustic portion of the show.
Stage banter: Surprisingly minimal, restricted to banal "thank you"s and crowd pump-ups. Pete Wentz did at one point demand that the audience do the wave. "Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it," right, Pete?

Those unfamiliar with early Fall Out Boy may doubt the merit of this comparison, but trust me, it's completely called for:

This song actually sounds a lot more like New Found Glory, but you get the point.

These days the band is a little more dynamic style-wise, and they've even managed to step up their live performance, which used to be notoriously atrocious:

I was pleasantly surprised by how technically competent they were. Either my bar for their live show was so low that anything would have impressed me, or they really have finally figured out how to play their instruments. And Patrick Stump, whose voice is no sure bet under the best circumstances, managed to carry the entire show without any major pitch catastrophes, a true feat considering all the vocal acrobatics on Infinity On High. It was apparent that Fall Out Boy had realized that music could be potentially very good to them if they are good to it, and they were therefore not messing around in the slightest. They ripped through a full set with skill and professionalism, and the crowd couldn't have been more enthusiastic: screaming along to the songs, dancing, proudly vocalizing their love for Pete. And as a nod to truly arena-worthy pop, they even did a passable cover of "Mr. Brightside."

It was distinctly fulfilling to see so many people experiencing the joy of live music in one place at one time, but I personally was left with an odd corporate aftertaste, perhaps because every time Pete Wentz defiantly threw his mic stand to the floor in the interest of theatrics a bored-looking roadie stationed at the side of the stage would scurry up to replace it almost before it even hit the ground. Little things like that distracted from the illusion of carefree fun and made me wonder what in the hell a band like Fall Out Boy was doing on the arena rock trajectory with minimal epic-ness and only a handful of really boppy songs. Blink 182 could handle such venues by sheer force of their cantankerous stage presence, but Fall Out Boy, though musically superior, lacks the energy to dominate a large-scale venue. Case in point, this performance in Houston from July:

The JumboTron is great and all, but this performance would be far more effective in a smaller club setting.

Then again, it's their prerogative to sell out Madison Square Garden, much to the delight of hundreds of 13-year-old girls from Long Island.

[Photo: Getty Images]

"YouTube is a stream of marketing and promoting. It can have a huge benefit or be damaging. I love the concept, it's benefited me immensely."

This is, of course, in reference to the mass-forwarded video clip where Akon took a page from Next and got a little too close with a 14-year-old fan. And don't forget the one where he flung a another guy who presumably paid to see him offstage like a sack of potatoes. Wait, embarrassing videos posted online? Suddenly the identification with Pete Wentz makes so much more sense.

Akon To Work With Fall Out Boy? [NME]