"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
I was a teenager in the '80s; I grew up in New Jersey; I have a sarcastic streak a mile wide. So obviously I was a fan of the Dead Milkmen.
Sure, they were uneven. Yes, they peaked early, and, like a lot of bands, the ten-year mark is the outer limits of their Good Stuff (and, yes, they kept coming back after that, not all of which I kept up with). But, at their best, they were the snottiest, funniest, punkiest band imaginable, for a particular moment and a particular time.
A lot of their stuff is still awesome forty years later: Big Lizard is almost touching, Life Is Shit actually is touching, Bitchin' Camaro is the quintessence of teen-boy-dom for my generation, Punk Rock Girl is a nearly perfect pop song, and Sri Lanka Sex Hotel a magnificent pseudo-apocalyptic vision.
But snottiness is best in small doses, so the purest Dead Milkmen songs, to me, are the short ones. Stuart can be hard to listen to these days, so I'm going with Brat in the Frat, the outsider's big two-middle-fingers-up at all the assholes in his way.
Hey!
I do not like you college brat
I do not like you and your frat
I do not like you at the shore
I do not like you drunk on Coors
I knew that guy - I hated that guy too. And the Milkmen perfectly encapsulate that youthful feeling of I don't want this; I don't like anything about this. That's what punk is for.
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