Milo Goes to College, Joe

I fear that I am everything that Descendents hate.

I was thinking about this during the four-hour fucking task of mowing the lawn this past week, frustrated because I let it get too long and the electric lawnmower didn't have the juice to handle it and it kept clogging and stalling. I kept hearing the lyrics to "Suburban Home" in my head, over and over, like a taunt. "I want a suburban home." The irony and sarcasm laying thick in my mind. (I also at the time had misheard the preceding lyric as "I want a big lawn," which would've been too big of a coincidence; I've since been told that the lyric is actually, "I wanna be a clone," which is sharper, and hurts more.)

It's a lot easier to be critical of this lifestyle when you are that age (Milo being nineteen when he went to college, after this album was recorded). As a teenager, you don't have to make any important life decisions, like who you want to be and where you'll be most comfortable. That's a process that takes you well into your 20s. It's so fucking easy to sneer at the idea of marriage when you're over a decade out from having to decide whether you want to settle down or not. It's really convenient to lay all your problems at the feet of your parents, to blame them for your own inner turmoil—mostly because it's sometimes or even usually the truth, but also because you have no way of walking in their shoes and empathizing with the difficulty of parenting, not yet.

As a flashpoint in music history, when hardcore split and some of it morphed into pop punk, it succeeds in gangbusters. Green Day and blink-182—in my mind the titans of the new-ish genre—have directly stated the influence, and I take their word for it. Even if I didn't have their word, I could hear it plainly in the sound. The bedrock of hardcore is there, with the pounding guitars and visceral vocals, but there's melody too, and that makes a huge difference. I can appreciate this album as a document of a particular style of sound in a particular time and place.

Milo Goes to College also became a blueprint for all those bands in terms of themes. And here's where things really get tricky for a 34-year-old listening to this album for the first time, because these are themes and emotions that have been personally jettisoned a long time ago. I'm talking about the potent mix of hip cool cynicism and a general fear of not having a place in the world due to one's age. Art Brut probably got to the heart of the matter in their song "My Little Brother" when they said: "And every song, every single song on that tape says exactly the same thing: 'Why don't our parents worry about us? Why don't our parents worry about us?'"

Fuck... I remember those feelings and emotions though. You try to be cool because you fear being alone, but being cool means othering yourself from the popular/uncool, and that othering usually just looks like pessimism. And so you have a group of teenagers all trying to be unique together, and all of them trying to find purpose in being miserable over the fact that life has no purpose. It's labeled as "suburban ennui," and if I recall correctly, then there was some of that in my youth, though it's tough to remember. The issue, I think, is that in your mid-30s, you start to see it for what it really was—confusing the idea of "living life to the fullest" with the idea of "coming up hard." When you're upper-middle class in a quiet suburban town, you start to look for excuses. You start to search for ways to make your life harder, or at least pretend that it's harder. Hence the cynicism and the sarcasm and running of the parents under the bus and the intense focus on the cruelty of school bullies and toxic disappointment of a failed teenage relationship and sheer fucking impossibility of understanding that anything would ever get better.

Vestiges linger, but in general this all fades over time. First, there is an escape ("going to college" both literal and figurative here). Then, you find in the place that you escaped to that things are even worse there. Finally, you return home, changed, more understanding that out there in the real world there is plenty of pain and cruelty to go around, and that the act of pretending in the suburbs was completely unnecessary. And you're old enough now to make certain life decisions designed to wall yourself from the cruelty that you know full well is out there, waiting. You want comfort and stability, and that's okay. The trade-off is that you'll have to live with the regret of spending your youth bitter and afraid. It never leaves you, that regret, even when you're happy and content and living your best life back in that suburban locale, when the worst part of your day is mowing your big suburban home lawn.

I hate that I am everything that Descendents fear.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5