Beelzebubba - Dead Milkmen (1988)
Yesterday I talked about the Anthrax album that I loved when I was a kid. It’s basically impossible to have an opinion on that record without also thinking about what I put into it back when I loved it. If I heard it now, free of that childhood formative memory, I’m not sure what I’d think of it.
As a counterpoint, today I wound up with an album from the same era (a year or so apart, depending on which source you believe) but one that I had no attachment to. I’m pretty sure the MTV staple Punk Rock Girl was the only song on this that I’d heard before today; a fine track but not one that was ever a huge part of my life. So listening to the rest of the record, free of any 14-year-old-in-the-80s opinions, here’s what I came away with:
Kids who aren’t as clever as they think they are do an impression of The Minutemen.
I suppose I would have been amused as a kid with the geeky outsider humor. I hadn’t listened to funk much at all at that point, so I might have been impressed at the pretty competent funk-inflected rhythm section. But to current-day me it sounds ridiculously sophomoric and derivative, with the only new ideas being dumber than average cheeky lyrics.
The only real change of pace is RC’s Mom, a “tribute” to James Brown’s recent arrest for domestic violence that’s in such poor taste it’s hard to believe it got past the label.
So I guess I come to bury the Dead Milkmen, not to praise them. Not fair, especially considering all the crap music I put in my head in the 80s that I still have an attachment to, but here we are.
