DS Book Club – Fahrenheit-182 by Mark Hoppus

Mark Hoppus is no stranger to public life, having been in one of the biggest rock bands of the last thirty years. blink-182 is a band that seemed open about everything, yet here we are with Hoppus’s book, Fahrenheit-182. Hoppus puts it all on the table in what can be described as a frantic confession with almost ADD-like sidetracks.

Written with Dan Ozzi, co-author of Laura Jane Grace’s Tranny and his own book Sell Out, Fahrenheit-182 is the book blink-182 fans have been waiting for. A behind-the-scenes look at one of the world’s biggest bands that details the band’s rise to fame and their shaky career. Mark Hoppus’ recollections of these stories are great. There’s humor, of course; he uses the same self-deprecating humor in his prose as in his songwriting, somewhere between dick jokes and dad jokes.

Hoppus straightens out many of the multiple answers the band gave to questions like where their name came from or the meaning behind certain songs. He also tells tour stories from when they were on the road with bands like Pennywise and Unwritten Law, and about their time on early iterations of the Warped Tour.

It was nice to get some context on the times the band broke up. That always seemed so manufactured and fake to me, but hearing the stories from Hoppus changed my mind. For a band that was so public with their goofiness, it makes sense there would be this VH1-like private story behind the scenes. Towards the end of the book, you get snippets of Hoppus’s cancer journals, which are rough reads, but the honesty and rawness of them are a breath of fresh air.

While Hoppus has led an interesting life, Dan Ozzi has done a great job with the pacing. A lot of these nonfiction books seem to be broken up into smaller chapters. This gives room to tell the story, but also allows for side stories and tangents if needed. It’s a newer format for me, and I don’t know if it’s distracting or not, but I feel it will grow on me in time. While it helps break up dense text, it does start to feel like extended sound bites after a bit.

When I was in high school, a friend made a patch for his jacket that said, “blink-182 before the KROQ incident”—a reference to the local rock station that had been playing some of the bands we liked. While the radio station was a tastemaker for some people, it was considered a death knell for the bands punk rockers had grown up with. It wasn’t an entirely new concept as this was a couple of years after Green Day’s Dookie and The Offspring’s Smash had already been released.

While those bands were working on their follow up records, the next wave of pop-punk bands including blink-182 were starting to receive some airplay. I think we get so caught up in bands “selling out” that we demonize many of the members who decided to further their careers. Many of them came from similar backgrounds and had the same interests.

While blink-182 always wanted to make the distinction that they are not a boy band, it’s hard not to lump them in that category, given the trajectory of the band. Hoppus’s fame happened to him like most people’s: unexpectedly. I’ve read a lot of books about the Beatles and it all feels very similar to stories you’d read there, but on a grander scale. His disdain for being marketed as a boy band in other countries probably didn’t help this aspect.

Hoppus was just this Gen X skate kid who liked The Cure and played bass in a band that just happened to take off. While things like cancer or reuniting with your best friend to make music again make us sympathize with Mark, he openly admits that he likes his fame. He tries to give examples of how Tom DeLonge and Travis Barker have handled theirs, but does his best to remain humble.

Overall, Fahrenheit-182 is a fantastic and interesting read. Outside of getting a behind-the-scenes look at the band, if you have any interest in how the music industry operated in the TRL-tinged mid-to-late 1990s, both in and out of the country, there’s something for you. Hoppus has written a book that is part love letter to his youth and part cautionary tale. I guess this is growing up.

Fahrenheit-182 is available through HarperCollins publishing here.