The nostalgic veneering of When We Were Young

Nostalgia is a drug.

Nostalgia can provide instant bursts of bliss. It can bring cascading sugary rainbow waves of good memories that flood your brain with joy. When taking the hits collectively, nostalgia can create an overwhelming sense of community that tears down the walls of isolation and loneliness, and can remind you there’s communal connection among people from far-flung places around the globe.

But nostalgia can also rot your brain. It can prevent you from moving on in your life, warping your past memories into a sunny narrative that didn’t actually happen and leave you craving hits of prior times that will never return. Nostalgia can overwhelm the senses, creating one-track thinking that causes you to ignore the actual issues in your immediate present. Nostalgia is healthy in doses, but you have to be wary of mainlining the stuff.

Anyway, a couple weekends ago I attended When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas.

The event is an extravaganza of pure distilled musical nostalgia for anyone who grew up listening to early 2000s pop punk and emo music. After a successful launch in 2022, this year’s edition of the event, held at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, boasted an insanely loaded lineup packed into a single-day bash (which was repeated both Saturday and Sunday). The bill featured massive pop punk hitmakers Blink-182, Green Day, the Offspring, Good Charlotte and Sum 41; slightly less heralded era favorites like Yellowcard, New Found Glory, Motion City Soundtrack, Save the Day, and MxPX; and then some deeper-cut scene standouts like Finch, Goldfinger, and Fenix TX. (And that’s not even close to half the artists packed into a single day of music.)
It was... a lot. I’ve heard a lot of great stage banter leading into songs over the years, but Blink-182 singer/guitarist Tom DeLonge might now hold the top spot for his intro to “Aliens Exist.”

“I was right about UFOs. F—- you.”

After leaving the pop punk juggernaut in 2015 (in part to do UFO research), DeLonge returned to Blink-182 in 2022, and the group marked the album release weekend of its new LP One More Time... with a stop at When We Were Young. While they weren't the band that went on last — that was Green Day — it was clear just from a scan of attendee's T-shirts that the largest contingent of folks were there to see Blink.

As someone who grew up as a pop punk kid in Montana, the one-two punch of Blink and Green Day was what drew me to WWWY. It would've been fair to say while growing up that Blink-182 was my favorite band and possibly Green Day was second, but I rarely got to see any bands of their ilk at the time. While I got seen Blink with DeLonge in the band once in college (at White River Amphitheatre outside of Seattle), I'd somehow never seen Green Day. Acts like that simply don't make tour stops in Montana.
My youthful refuge was the summer pop punk extravaganza of the Warped Tour, which brought punk and pop punk acts for traveling single-day fests. The Warped Tour stopped in Montana a few times and then traveled to Boise for a couple more renditions, and as a music devotee, it was my favorite day of the year. (Christmas never had a circle pit.) When We Were Young essentially was just the Warped Tour Redux.

Before the big nighttime sets there were plenty of highlights from names that those less in the early 2000s pop punk/emo scene might not instantly recognize. Things started off for me with the Ataris, who came out of the gate with their three most beloved songs: "In This Diary," "San Dimas High School Football Rules," and the group's hit cover of "The Boys of Summer." This hits blitz was not uncommon as the overstacked lineup — 55 bands playing in a single day across only four stages— meant that many groups had to play sets lasting 30 minutes or less. While this created unrelenting hits of nostalgic serotonin, it also made everything feel mildly rushed.
While some groups struggled with the sound mix (more on that in a bit), a few acts maximized their limited time and WWWY's general constraints. Melodic emo stalwarts Saves the Day sounded absolutely stellar as they ripped though beloved tunes from their touchstone albums Stay What You Are and Through Being Cool. The best scream-alongs of the day came via the wildly underrated and catchy screamo group Finch. The second best stage banter of the day came via Christian pop rock act Relient K, whose frontman Matt Thiessen jokingly referred to his band's set as When We Were Youth Group. And bucking the pure nostalgic theme of the fest, Beach Bunny — the excellent young indie pop rock band that's actually a going concern — was an absolutely delightful breath of fresh air.

Perhaps the purest moment of nostalgia the whole day came during Goldfinger's set. The ska-leaning pop punk act is by far best known for the inclusion of its song "Superman" on the soundtrack of the wildly popular video game, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. So how did the band decide to present their biggest tune? Well how about actually brining Tony Hawk on stage to sing it? It was a delightfully unexpected moment that perfectly overlapped the Venn diagram of 1999 skater, gamer, punk kids.

Once the sun went down, the co-headliners I'd traveled for did not disappoint.
One of the perhaps more unlikely developments over the past couple decades is that Blink-182 hasn't aged poorly. There was always an incredibly sophomoric tone to the pop punk hitmakers, whether it be devoting album tracks to quick little cuss fests or making dick jokes non-stop as between-song stage banter (best captured on the live album, The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show). But the fact that by all accounts Tom DeLonge, bassist/singer Mark Hoppus, and drummer Travis Barker are actually standup dudes (unlike some of their peers who turned out to be creeps), that immature parts of Blink's catalogue mostly seems innocent and goofy, while the hooky hits still hold up. It's also nearly impossible for Blink-182 to not sound great live because of how much of a beast Barker is on his drum kit. Running through their hits with reckless abandon and thousands and thousands of people all singing along delivered what that assembled masses were seeking.

While it was a hard act to follow, I got just about everything I wanted from my first Green Day experience. Starting out hot with a slew of songs from the modern classic American Idiot, Billy Joe Armstrong and Co. showcased how comfortable the band is playing in front of massive crowds of this sort. The crowd felt in a slightly less stressed mood after some folks had cleared out post-Blink, which added a level of joy to the group ripping through hits like "Basket Case" and "Minority," as well as rock opera epics like "Homecoming." Singing along near the top of my lungs felt like a warm embrace of my younger self, one that made the rest of the world melt away for nearly two hours. It's the best type of nostalgia — one providing past warm without feeling regressive.
And while the musical highs were certainly top-tier, the festival experience was something much closer to a clusterf—-. To put it bluntly, I’ve never attended a worse organized major fest than When We Were Young. (And that’s speaking as someone who has traveled across North America to catch various fests.)
On a very basic level, the festival is overloaded in every way. If the WWWY weren’t concerned milking nostalgia for maximum profit, the experience for everyone involved would obviously be better to scale back by a third. Cutting the crowds by selling a third fewer tickets would make everything less stressful. (The lower number of total tickets could just be offset by the price of the tickets — anyone going to WWWY is already spending a ton to be there as base level tickets were $340 per day.)
Cutting the amount of bands playing would counterintuitively improve the product as well. While it looks stunning on a show poster, it’s shortchanging some of these bands by forcing sub-30 minute sets. Cutting down the size of the bill would create less lineup conflicts to frustrate fans.

It would also improve the sound of the fest. While the side stages creatively had rotating stages so one band could set up their gear while the other played — creating almost no wait time between one band finishing and the next one starting — the result is that many of the bands relegated to these stages sounded terrible. I don’t think I’ve ever heard more consistently thin guitar sounds, which sucked the life out of many sets. (I’ve worked as a concert sound engineer, so I’m speaking from a “I literally could do this better” point of view.)

If scaled back slightly, things would feel less like herded animals considering the straight line layout of the Festival Grounds which made moving between stages a painstaking endeavor. It would also mean people could actually see the main stage bands with their own eyes — if you weren’t parked unmoving in front of the main stages by sundown you basically had to watch the bands play on the distant big screens.

The mass of humanity in front of the side-by-side main stages wasn’t just frustrating for folks wanting to see their favs up close — it was also generally unsafe. For starters, there were no trash cans to be found in the pit areas, so by late afternoon the ground was basically a gross layer of littered refuge. (This is an organizational issue more than a concert going one — what are you supposed to do when the nearest trash can might be a 10 minute walk through a crowd with the risk of not being able to get back to your friends?) The overpacked crowds also meant people were less likely to leave their spots to get water in the brutal 90+ degree Vegas heat, which is far from ideal. Things got more sketchy once the sun went down, as many exhausted concertgoers simply sat down… only there was virtually no lighting, so anyone trying to maneuver through the crowd was liable to kick or stomp their fellow concertgoers purely by accident. Heaven forbid anyone had a medical emergency in that mess — I’ve never been to a fest that felt less safe.

When We Were Young should be a communal celebration — and it certainly was during massive Blink-182 sing-alongs and such — but the suboptimal organization forced folks into be at odds with one another. I admit that I am not immune to nostalgia’s grasp. I’m both glad I attended When We Were Young and can’t fathom ever attending the shoddily run festival ever again

The musical memories from the day will eventually themselves become warm nostalgia in my brain, but I’m not such an addict that I need to recklessly return for another fix.