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Linguistics professor attempts to analyze Tom DeLonge's Blink-182 accent

Tom DeLonge's silly punk rock voice is one of the longest-standing jokes in the pop-punk community. The former Blink-182 vocalist has delivered his lines in some truly questionable inflections over the years—”the voice inside my yead” in “I Miss You” immediately comes to mind. A linguistics professor recently analyzed DeLonge's voice and revealed some startling facts about the shifting culture of California over the years, and how punk rock fits into it all.

Read more: Blink-182 continuing “friendly divorce” from Tom DeLonge, says Mark Hoppus

The study is extremely in depth and looks at the origins of punk rock music to explain the “pop-punk accent.”

The pop-punk accent really became smooth and polished a little bit later, in the mid-1990s, with bands like Blink-182 and the Offspring, both hailing from Southern California. Their singers (Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge from Blink-182, Dexter Holland from the Offspring) totally abandoned any pretenses of Britishness. Instead they took their own accent, the California accent, and ramped it up, pushed it to new extremes. It was almost exactly what happened in London. Pop-punk singers became more Californian than the Californians.

Check out the full study here, at Atlas Obscura.

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