Jerk Music Critic: The Dead Milkmen, Beelzebubba

Never mind the Sex Pistols, here's the Dead Milkmen, determined to out-Rotten John Lydon and out-Clash Joe Strummer, but you would be wrong to be dismissive. The band's earlier efforts were admittedly uneven, some high points here and there, but finally on this one they actually bring together decent production values, consistent jams and some amusingly offensive, truly inspired songwriting. Do you find other punk bands bland? How about one that grinningly dives into fraternity excess ("Brat in the Frat"), domestic violence ("RC's Mom"), homophobia ("Stuart," probably the album's satiric peak, with such deathless lyrics as "Have you looked at the soil around any large US city with a big underground homosexual population? Des Moines, Iowa, perfect example!"), prostitution ("Sri Lanka Sex Hotel"), suicide ("Bleach Boys"), income inequality ("Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me," laying the groundwork for the 99% in 1988), public broadcasting telethons ("Born to Love Volcanoes"), armed rebellion ("Ringo Buys A Rifle") and death ("Life Is Sh*t"). This kind of commitment to controversy makes the album's popular single "Punk Rock Girl" seem unforgivably anodyne by comparison, when really it's merely the lighter track among heavier ones, leavened with a heavy dollop of smirky snark and unapologetic shock value. Heck, they namecheck Bob Crane in "Life is Sh*t," for crying out loud, the final track, which amazingly manages to be both incredibly poignant and callously insensitive all at the same time. This album is not for everyone; take "RC's Mom" as a for-instance, as the horns and the bass boogie and Rodney Anonymous howls, "Gonna beat my wife! Gonna hit her with a 2-by-4!" If that made you stutter and fume, you should find something else. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be finding out what the queers are doing to the soil. (Content: stylized violence, explicit language, sexual and drug themes, incredibly amusing bad taste.)

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟🌟
A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟
Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

🌟🌟
Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

🌟
Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

💩
How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.