Milo Goes To College

About

All due respect to the Buzzcocks and the Ramone, but no single album had as profound an effect on the development of pop punk as Descendants’ 1982 classic <i>Milo Goes to College</i>. Formed in the late 1970s in the Los Angeles suburb of Manhattan Beach by teenagers who bonded over coffee and fishing, the band members instantly seemed different from their more urbane peer. These guys were neither poets nor radicals nor nihilists—they were boy-next-door types whose sources of frustration were as old-fashioned and evergreen as a recent breakup (“Catalina”) or a conservative parent (“Suburban Home”). On <i>Milo Goes to College</i>, the humor was screwball (“I Wanna Be a Bear”), the values traditional (“Marriage”). And the album’s fantasies of eventually being seen as the Good Guy or White Knight touched on a rage that foreshadowed the more buttoned-up side of American hardcore (“Hope”). <i>Milo Goes to College</i> was punk, but the band members were self-described “square[s] going nowhere” (“I’m Not a Punk”). (As for the album’s title: Their singer, Milo Aukerman, really <i>was</i> getting ready to go to college, eventually earning a PhD in biology.) .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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