“What's My Age Again?” by blink-182

"What's My Age Again?" was the opening shot from Enema of the State, blink-182's third album, released through MCA in 1999, and the first single to feature Travis Barker on drums. It started life as "Peter Pan Complex", but MCA figured nobody would get the reference and had the title changed.

The song is a shrug of a confession about never growing up. Mark Hoppus wrote most of it, though the credit is shared with guitarist Tom DeLonge, and he sings lead while playing bass; he wouldn't call it autobiographical but owned up to acting like a kid right through his twenties. That arpeggiated guitar figure at the top is the hook everybody remembers, and the rest ambles along at a mid-tempo bounce, with Jerry Finn producing and Tom Lord-Alge mixing it to a pop sheen without losing the brat. Roger Joseph Manning Jr. added keyboards.

The video, with the three of them running naked through the streets of Los Angeles, lived on MTV. It sat at number two on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks for 10 weeks and became the band's first song to cross over to pop radio. KROQ and 91X both crowned it their top song of 1999.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.