All due respect to the Buzzcocks and the Ramones, but no single album had as profound an effect on the development of pop punk as Descendants’ 1982 classic Milo Goes to College. 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 peers. 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 Milo Goes to College, 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”). Milo Goes to College 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 was getting ready to go to college, eventually earning a PhD in biology.)
In the same way The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds captured the frustration of feeling like an adult but still being treated like a kid, Milo was a beacon to teenagers (and teens at heart) who were angry at the world, but found the conventions of rebellion—the drama, the operatic self-importance—silly and off-key. From here, you get the mix of toilet humor and genuine empathy that drove blink-182 and NOFX, and the mix of aggression and catchiness that inspired Green Day and My Chemical Romance (not to mention pretty much every major band to play the Warped Tour). Even the stuff that would (and should) bother modern listeners—most notably the homophobic slurs on “I’m Not a Loser,” or the way the semi-patronizing romantic ode “Bikeage” comes off like an incel’s bedtime story—feels socially accurate in ways a lot of 1980s punk simply does not. And whether or not the members “get the girl” is beside the point—when she eventually takes her own life, they scream out their loneliness, and wonder what they could have done to save her, the way good boys do (“Jean Is Dead”).
