Were you considered "cool" in high school? I resoundingly was not. All throughout puberty, my features jostled for room on a face that had not yet grown into itself. My skin was constantly flushed and riddled with acne. My teeth leaned into each other like an unstable wall of small bricks. Profoundly uncomfortable, every "own clothes day" brought with it a fresh hell: I crimped my hair, stuffed tissue paper in my unnecessary bra and glossed my lips in a piss-poor attempt to prove to the popular girls that I was "normal". I wore board shorts, vest tops and wallet chains in a desperate plea to convince the punk kids that I "could hang". I pierced my lip, smothered my eyes in black liner and let a boy two years above attempt to stretch my ears with a pencil.

Unsurprisingly, none of these efforts made me feel any more secure. I always returned to my default state – a bookish nerd with a mass of dirty blonde hair parted in the middle and a school uniform jumper with holes picked nervously into the sleeves – which I considered to be a "blank slate" at the time but in retrospect was just my personality. It's tricky, trying to navigate your identity when you are not yet a fully formed person. It's even trickier trying to find common ground with people when you're in your early teens and everyone is furiously competing to not be the biggest loser. A lot of music came out in the late early 00s that transcended the social hierarchies of high school: Eminem with The Marshall Mathers LP, Papa Roach's "Last Resort" (which appears on Now That's What I Call Music! 48 between Feeder and Planet Funk) and Blink-182, whose irresistible bangers about fancying girls, snogging girls and being rejected by girls were embraced by almost anyone with a libido.

Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants And Jacket felt, and continue to feel, personal because all the songs are about being young, dumb and horny, which, like, aren't we all? But, easy as it is to feel like Blink-182 captured your own personal experience of puberty in which heartbreak and disappointment made regular appearances, the whole point was that they captured the most common experience of puberty – one of lust and insecurity and fart jokes – that rang true for popular kids, punks and weirdos who try to perform body modification on their friends at school alike. Blink-182 may be a pop punk band, but regularly spinning "What's My Age Again?" didn't say anything more about your personality than owning a Gameboy or watching The Simpsons. Their second album, Dude Ranch – which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Sunday – was a slightly different story.