If there’s one thing I learned from the oh-so-1990’s, the decade one could say I “grew up” in, it’s that I really hate punk music. I figured it out the instant I heard the first mainstream congested yelps come out of Billy Joe Armstrong and his band “Greenday”, a band that tries in a very ironic way to simultaneously thwart some invisible “The Man” that’s trying to bring them down by, I don’t know, not giving them a big enough cut off their million-selling records to afford the drummer a decent lobotomy, and appearing on a Tiger Beat fold-out poster that my (female) cousin had on her wall. Yes, even as as 13/14 year old, I had a pretty strong B.S. detector, and punk set it off just as bad as Rap, New-Country, and 80’s Hair Metal. It started with Greenday, wound up somewhere around Blink 182, and only got worse from there.
Of course, NOT having “grown up” in the 80’s, it took me until quite recently to figure out that Punk Rock From The 80’s, at some points, was really really rad. The album that brought this to my attention is Descendents’ Milo Goes To College:
This album is the band’s official debut, after joining a young singer guy whose name was Milo and who really was going to college. Of all things, for a doctorate in biochemistry. Yes what sounds like a snarling, immature lead singer of a group of particularly violent kids is actually a bespectacled nerd whose work in the fields of research chemistry has put the band on hold on more than one occasion. This, my friends, is exactly what I was looking for.
See, I’ve always WANTED to enjoy punk rock because inside of nerdy, non-bespectacled music enjoyer Me is someone who yearns for the raw, unequivocal emotion of thrashing about on instruments in a barely contained field of 4/4 time while shouting about something or other. It’s the stench of the pretensions that the pop-punk bands of today seem to have about what they’re doing that drove me away. I tried to listen to the “originators” of punk music (Sex Pistols, etc.), but found myself turned off by the total lack of musical ability and the rather unfortunate fixation with drugs and alcohol that were so very old-hat by then. I also tried the Ramones, but they’re more “quick pop” than anything. I felt like I was close with the Zip Code Rapists, but even they are about something a bit different.
So, when I loaded up the Descendents’ album and started hearing an all-over-the-place bass-line and crazy beat that I knew was going to be punk rock, I was let down at first. Of course, by the time the extremely quick (but rather long at 2 minutes) “Myage” was done playing, I was still paying attention because there was a certain something to this mess that spoke to me.
The songs are dirty, angry, and extremely fast, but they contain what I would consider some fairly intricate chord progressions and melodies, so much better than the usual 3-chord mess that the bands I hate subscribe to. Even if the melodies don’t make a lick of sense, I appreciate the fact they are there.
I said the songs were fast, indeed there are 15 songs on Milo Goes To College and the entire album is just over 22 minutes long. In less time than a commercial-less Saturday morning cartoon, these guys carry us through a spectrum of feelings about girls, parents (“Parents, why won’t they shut up?”), bears, being a loser, Suburban Homes (in the song “Suburban Home”), conformism, violence, and just about every cuss word you can think of, and never once do they present themselves in a stale, contrived way, because they simply don’t have time. They also run through a ton of key changes and rhythm changes, why the song “Tonyage” (apparently they have a habit of adding -age to words to make titles) has 3 distinct rhythm changes and a bass-line intro, all in a song that is 57 seconds long. Now that’s quality for your money, especially since the song makes the point about the “new wavers” all being “surfers last year”, ah it’s good to know that there was such dissent against the hip back when I was busy being born.
So yes, it looks like I have finally seen the light about pure Punk Rock (or “hardcore rock” if you really want to split hairs) and how it can actually be interesting, fast, violent, and yet intelligent in its own very subtle way. It wasn’t the Sex Pistols, it wasn’t The Ramones, and it sure as Hell was not NOFX or any of the other abusers of that circusey one-two punk beat everyone signs up for nowadays. No I guess it took a band I had never heard of before someone half-heartedly suggest I check them out (without telling me what genre they are), and a 22 minute long album of undilluted awesome.
I guess I shouldn’t be too shocked that this band is from the 80’s, as I know from my history books that a lot of the punk that wasn’t considered “poseur” came from that decade. Also this was the same year The Young Ones went off air, and even though it was a television show, that show conveys the ideal Punk attitude better than anything I have heard in the 90’s. This band sounds like the kind of band they would have listened to on that show.
Of course, this doesn’t make me a “true” believer in Punk or anything. If one thing can be said about my overall music tastes, it’s that I seem to have this knack for missing out on liking entire genres of music, but always finding that one exception to the rule. Indeed, there are acts in New-Country, Rap, 80’s Hair Metal, and now Punk Rock that I actually really love, despite my feelings for the entire genre. I guess there’s a little something to love in every style of music, even music that wants to kick you in the pants.
Filed under: Albums | Tagged: 1982, 80's, Descendents
Dude, you so hit the nail on the head with this post. I couldn’t have said it any better. I think “here with me” was the song that made me love the Descendents. A nerdy high school programmer type got caught up in the wrong crowd after subscribing to the angst of NOFX and the like. To make a long story short, four years of wreckage ended me up in Minneapolis in a halfway house. My roommate put the CD on and left the room as I sat gazing out on 494 on that chilly overcast day in may… I recall feeling sad as I thought about how far away I was from my loving girlfriend and how few options I had. It was just then that “Here With Me” came on, and it made me feel awesome right away.
It was 394 actually. And I forgot to say I have since then recovered and am still with the same girl. Milo is awesome!