The one-hit wonder from 2000 that went a whopping five times platinum in the UK
As a 2000s baby, I swiftly realised my generation was down and out on their luck.
By the time we got to the right age, the care-free, creative MySpace playground was soon swapped out for more invasive, demanding forms of social media, while Blockbuster’s up and down the country were shutting, and the heyday of Britpop was all but over.
One thing we did have, however, was pop punk. The genre exploded around 1994 with Green Day’s Dookie and Offspring’s Smash, two offerings that turned youthful angst from a stagnant burden into a superpower alongside melodic basslines and chaotic drums. Boredom became exciting, and anxiety became chic, and in 2001, we were treated to Blink-182’s Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, which made history as the first primarily pop-punk album to debut at the top spot on the US Billboard 200.
Soon enough, this shifted into a greater mass interest in pop-rock, moving away from the pop-punk chord-driven style expertly heralded by Green Day and Blink-182, and toward pop’s chewy, catchy melodies and a less aggravated sonic infrastructure that saw Coldplay, Maroon 5, and The Killers pick up where the nerds with guitars left off.
All things considered, it’s incredible that a one-hit-wonder from 2000 predicted the next decade of musical trends and fused the allure of pop-punk and pop-rock, neither of which had yet had a chance to fully bloom, but that’s exactly what American rock band Wheatus managed to do. Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag’ might not strictly read as pop-punk, but it shares many of the genre’s qualities, dripping in angsty storytelling with an awkward narrator oozing with self-pity amidst it all.
The track was released as the lead single from their self-titled debut album, and hyperbolically illustrated guitarist and vocalist Brendan B Brown’s summer of 1984 on Long Island, when he was only ten years old. In 2012, Brown put the song’s success down to its familiar themes, explaining, “Every teenager has to go through that ‘being an outsider’ thing, at least a little bit. So that story is still the same for people, even if it’s thirty years after I went through it”.
For an unknown band, the success of the single was shockingly immediate: in Australia, it spent four weeks at number one, also topping the charts in Austria and Flanders, and in the UK, the song peaked at number two on the singles chart, where it sat for two weeks, barred from the top spot by Atomic Kitten’s ‘Whole Again’.
However, in the US, the track interestingly never made its way onto the coveted US Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number seven on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks Chart. Turns out the group didn’t need their home soil as by 2014, the track had sold five million copies worldwide, after re-entering the UK charts on multiple occasions in 2011, 2012, and 2023. On British soil, the song was certified quadruple platinum in 2024.
My generation mightn’t have had all the creative boredom and doorstep socialising as the 1990s, but we did have ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, and we’ll take that.
