“I saved the world from Saddam Hussein”: How Blink-182 advised the US Government
In the mid-1990s, you could say ignorance was bliss. On this side of the pond, we had Britpop, New Labour and an influx of experimental artistry that perennially shone cultural sunshine on our shores. And for the youth of America, it was a similar story. Amidst the economic boom were artists and musicians building getaways for idealised escapism, far away from the world’s warring troubles. As the likes of Blink-182 soundtracked middle American suburbia, the Middle East couldn’t have felt further away.
In the less globally connected 1990s, the lens of adolescence was solely focused on your more immediate communities. The wider world of music and art would be fed to you through magazines and bootleg tapes, to help guide you through your ever-changing feelings at that time.
As Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge harmonised “Say it ain’t so, I will not go / Turn the lights off, carry me home”, you knew the red-cupped house parties of teenage America were coming to an end and the blissful memories of privileged youth were being made. Blink-182 were unashamedly a band for days of adolescence and were best left in the dusty skate-parks than in the control rooms of military officials.
Nevertheless, they had a crack. As they got lost in the sound of screaming fans, they genuinely thought their strategic military voice needed to be heard and provided what many pockets of fans are attributing as the nail in Saddam Hussein’s coffin.
“I saved the world from Saddam Hussein”, a now flippant Mark Hoppus explained. He continued, “We were performing for the troops in the Middle East, and we were on an aircraft carrier,” adding, “And I was sitting down with an admiral of the fleet after dinner before we were going on stage. And I said, ‘Hey, before I go on stage, I have an idea of how we can capture Saddam Hussein.’”
While the official understandably laughed and brushed off the need for any advice, Hoppus pressed on. “You kind of know where he’s at. And he used to release these videotapes to his followers. And he would like put a flag up behind him, and he’d look into the camera, and he’d say, ‘Rise up against the American dogs’ or whatever it was that he would say. And then he’d release the tapes.”
“I said, OK, if you have an idea where you think he might be, why don’t you fly drones or aircraft in grid patterns, blasting as loud as you can, time code, above the range of human hearing, but within the dynamic range that will get captured on a videocassette. And then when he releases his videos, you can take the audio portion and extract the time code and triangulate where he might be.”
It was at this point, Hoppus claims his advice was met was an increased sense of curiosity, as the intensely staring military official then left the conversation to presumably draft up Hoppus’ letter of recognition. It simply can’t have been anything else, as “four months later, they’d captured Saddam Hussein, so it must have been me,” Hoppus said.
The spiky hair nu-metal aesthetic combined with knee-length denim shorts was an eccentric enough look for the pop-punk heyday of the 1990s. But the idea of Mark Hoppus breaking out the walkie-talkies and leading a recon mission against the world’s most wanted man? Perhaps a bridge too far.
