YMMV / Bowling for Soup

• Covered Up:
  • Raise your hand if you thought "1985" was originally by them. It was actually written by SR-71.
  • "Stacy's Mom" managed to be a case of this before they covered it. (As in, everyone thought they did it when it was really Fountains of Wayne.)
  • For everyone who grew up in the 2000s who don't know about the original, "I Melt With You" by Modern English.
• Periphery Demographic: Despite many of their songs covering very adult content, they have a lot of teenaged fans, due to them having done their cover of "I Melt with You" for Sky High (2005), which many of those teenagers grew up with, and because they did the theme song for Phineas and Ferb, which has a Periphery Demographic of its own. Lampshaded in "Friends Chicks Guitars."
  We've been in this band
  longer than most of our fans have been...
• Refrain from Assuming:
  • Our Hometown is what shows up in the lyrics, My Hometown is the song name.
  • It's called "Ohio (Come Back to Texas)," not just "Come Back to Texas."
• Signature Song: "1985" or "High School Never Ends". "Girl All The Bad Guys Want" is also one of their more popular songs, being their first song to really hit big.
  • "Today is Gonna Be A Great Day" for their younger fans.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • "1985" is about scoffing at a woman who has yet to catch up to culture of The '90s. To illustrate how out of touch she it, the singer notes that she's no Limp Bizkit fan, a band whose popularity did not survive long past the Turn of the Millennium.
    • There are now several different remakes that change the song to "2005" parodying people in their late 20s to early 30s who grew up listening to Bowling For Soup and their contemporaries.
  • "High School Never Ends" falls into this as well. Referencing early 2000's celebrity stories like Tom Cruise's marriage to Katie Holmes, Mary Kate Olsen's weight loss, and so on. Several of these use just their first names ("How did Mary Kate lose all that weight / And Katie had a baby, so I guess Tom's straight"), which makes it more confusing for those who didn't grow up during those celebrities' heyday.
• Wangst: Mocked quite spectacularly in "Self-Centered".
  I'm gonna feel sorry for myself/I want to blame it on everyone else/I want to be self-centered/and make everybody feel sorry for me
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The band did the theme song for Phineas and Ferb (and lead singer Jaret Reddick even voices a character on the show), and also did songs for lots of kids movies, so they must be kid-friendly, right? Well, not really. Though they did Bowdlerize some of their songs for Radio Disney airplay, the unedited versions of the songs aren't really kid-friendly (the unedited version of "High School Never Ends" for example mentions sex and drugs in the chorus alone), and that applies to their albums in general, lots of songs about sex, drinking, and profanity.

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