Blink 182 consists of Mark Hoppus (bassist / vocalist), Tom Delonge (guitarist / vocalist), Travis Barker (drummer).
The correct title of this article is blink-182. The initial letter is capitalized due to technical restrictions.
blink-182 was a Southern-Californian pop-punk band that was formed in 1992 by Tom DeLonge, Mark Hoppus, and Scott Raynor in the northern San Diego suburb of Poway, California. In 1998, Travis Barker replaced Raynor as the band's drummer.
The group is known for playing catchy melodies, as well as their satirical toilet humour. Known as a band that plays up-tempo songs with prominent major-chord harmonies, often digitally mixed, to provide a much cleaner sound than typical punk/rock recordings generally employing distortion and ragged analogue mixes to achieve the opposite effect. The lyrical content of their songs, especially prior to their last album, is often humorous and uplifting. Although the band is labelled as Blink 182 on albums prior to Raynor's departure, the specific syntax for the band's current name is blink-182, as opposed to Blink-182 or their former name, blink. The numbers 182 were added to the band's name to prevent a trademark conflict with an Irish pop/rock group that calls itself " Blink".
In May 1993, the band originally known just as "Blink," released a demo tape known as Flyswatter, recorded in drummer Scott Raynor's bedroom. A boom box was used to record this material, resulting in poor sound quality. According to Hoppus, around eighty copies had been produced. Before the end of the year, the band released another demo tape known as Buddha. Around 1,000 copies of this were produced by Filter Records.
In early 1994, blink released their debut full-length album, Cheshire Cat, released on Grilled Cheese Records. The album contained many new versions of songs that had appeared on the Buddha demo.
Shortly after the release of Cheshire Cat, blink was threatened with legal action by a techno band in Ireland of the same name. In order to avoid a lengthy lawsuit, blink added "-182" to the end of their name. Although there are rumours as to why these numbers were chosen (for example, that it is the number of times Al Pacino utters the word " fuck" in Scarface, that they represent Hoppus's ideal weight, or the position in the alphabet of the letters 'R' and 'B,' referring to the northern San Diego suburb of Rancho Bernardo, making the meaning of 'blink' [possibly fuck] RB.), all the band members but one have made it clear that the numbers were picked at random. In one interview, Travis stated that the "182" was the U.S. radio codeword meaning 'homicide' (apparently confusing "182," the radio codeword for conspiracy, for " 187"). During the pop punk boom of the 1990s, blink-182 was signed by MCA in 1996 which later became Geffen Records, which they stayed with.