Decent American Artists
"Out in the woods
Up to no good
I wanna make friends with the badger"
—The Badger Song
Punk grew in popularity during the 1970s and by the mid-eighties it was a pretty mainstream genre, with prominent political punk bands gaining mainstream critical acclaim and billboard hits. Punk music was Serious Business, often addressing social ills that were largely ignored by mainstream society.
The Dead Milkmen took another angle.
Poking fun at religion, politics, society, and punk music itself, the Philly-based Dead Milkmen are certainly one of the greatest satiric rock bands. Invoking, subverting, and referencing standard musical cliches, the Dead Milkmen had a pretty steady underground following from their start in 1983 and received more mainstream attention from Punk Rock Girl. The band broke up in 1995, having released eight studio albums, one live record, and a bunch of other side releases.
In 2008 they reunited with a new bassist, Dan Stevens, as founding member Dave Blood passed away in 2004. Their latest album, Quaker City Quiet Pills, was released in 2023.
"Big Trope in My Backyard":
- All Just a Dream: "Silly Dreams"
- Appease the Volcano God: in "The Fez", which features a chant of "you have angered the volcano god!"
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: From "Methodist Coloring Book""God hates war
And God hates crime
But he really hates people
Who color outside the lines"- Also in "Nutrition" where the speaker admits that he's a deadbeat and has no ambition, but hey, at least he cares about his nutrition.
- Ax-Crazy: The speaker in "Violent School," "If You Love Somebody Set Them On Fire," and quite a few more. The rant at the end of "I Tripped Over The Ottoman" takes pride of place, though:This is my friend, Mr Chainsaw!
- Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: Satirized by the Dead Milkmen themselves and sung about
- Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: "The Badger Song"The badger's your friend
Make friends with the badger
The badger's your friend
Make love to the badger" - Comedic Sociopathy: From "Punk Rock Girl":"We got into a car and away we started rollin'
I said how much you pay for this
Said nothing man it's stolen" - Conspiracy Theorist: "Conspiracy Song"
- The speaker in "Stuart," who has theories about what the queers are doing to the soil!
- There's also the narrator to "Peter Bazooka" who follows around his congressman who doesn't look like his congressman.
- And the old man in "Epic Tales of Love and Adventure" who explains how "doctors and lawyers and bankers and priests are controlled by UFOs!"
- The speaker in "All Around The World" claims that people "all around the world" want to kill him because He Knows Too Much about UFOs and mind control, and also mentions having a radio wired to his brain.
- The Cuckoolander Was Right: In "I Dream of Jesus," the speaker's mother claims to have found Jesus trapped inside of an old Manischevitz bottle. Considering the mother's past history of getting into fights and her former church which believed dancing was "a one-way ticket to hell" the fact that Jesus is actually in the bottle is pretty surprising.
- Deep South: "Hello my name is Billy Bob and I don't give a damn" in "Tiny Town"
- The cover of Beezelbubba features a cloven-hooved redneck farmer leaning on a tractor.
- Don't Try This at Home: "Part 3" contains the warning: "Don't any of you kids try this guitar solo at home - that man is a trained professional"
- Fan Hater: The speaker in "Instant Club Hit (You'll Dance to Anything)" hates the bands and hates the people who dance to them. Of course, the speaker is just jealous that a bunch of arty European bands are more popular than his decent, American music.
- Funny Background Event: In the music video for "Punk Rock Girl," just about every time it shows the band "playing," it's usually just Joe Jack singing and playing guitar while his bandmates goof off behind him. They actually get Joe Jack visibly
corpsing at their antics at times. Also, even when Rodney isn't goofing off, he's standing in the background reading a newspaper instead of miming bass - this may be a Creator In-Joke because Rodney has claimed in interviews that, despite being credited, he didn't get to actually participate in the studio recording of the song. - Fun with Acronyms: "V.F.W. (Veterans of A Fucked up World)" is a play on the acronym of an American veterans organization, Veterans of Foreign Wars. The acronym would have been familiar to the band at the time, as punk rock shows would often take place in rented VFW halls when there wasn't a proper venue that would book the bands.
- Genie in a Bottle: "I Dream of Jesus" except it's not a genie, it's Jesus Christ, and he's in a Manischevitz bottle that the speaker's mother finds behind a 7/11.
- Goth: Mocked in "Instant Club Hit (You'll Dance To Anything)""You wear black clothes say you're poetic
The sad truth is you're just pathetic" - "I Want" Song: "Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me"
- Lyrical Dissonance: Dark humor and lyrical dissonance are pretty standard tools
- Manic Punk Dream Girl: Punk Rock Girl. She takes him on a whirlwind adventure of raising hell in the mall, at the pizza place, driving stolen cars, though it seems apparent that the protagonist is much more interested in her than she is in him.
- Motor Mouth: In "Moron"
- Murder Ballad: "William Bloat", which sets a Raymond Calvert poem to music, comes off as a parody of one: The title character slits his wife's throat with a razor blade in her sleep, then hangs himself with her bedsheet... His suicide is successful, but his wife lives because "the razor blade was German made / but the sheet was Belfast linen".
- Parody Names: Drummer "Dean Clean" and lead guitarist "Joe Jack Talcum" are gentle parodies of punk names like Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, etc. For the album Soul Rotation, Rodney Anonymous switched his stage name to HP Hovercraft, punning on H. P. Lovecraft.
- Philadelphia: Expect strong Philly accents and references to Philly landmarks
- Phone Word: The instrumental "KKSuck2" is named after a friend of the band's phone number.
- Product Placement: "Tacoland" is a completely sincere endorsement of the namesake punk rock venue, and even ends by telling the listener how to get to it by car (at least, back when it was open).
- Punk Rock
- Pyromaniac: "If You Love Somebody, Set Them On Fire""Oily rags are special things
You know to me they're diamond rings
Maybe we can have some fun
Maybe we can burn someone" - The Quincy Punk: Satirized quite a few times, most notably in "Punk Rock Girl"
- Retraux: "If The Kids Could Git Together" was newly released in 2015, but was meant to sound like it was recorded thirty years earlier and had just recently been uncovered. It's their side from a supposed "lost" split 7 inch with Philadelphia Hardcore Punk group Flag Of Democracy, who pulled the same thing for their side of the record. The black and white artwork was meant to look like something quickly thrown together with an old photocopier, keeping with the look of flyers and no-budget singles of the time.
- Running Gag: For a while, they had one with Dave Blood dressing in drag to play Cross Cast Roles in their music videos - He portrayed a waitress in "Punk Rock Girl", a female human alien in "The Secret Of Life", and a go-go dancer in "Smokin' Banana Peels".
- Shout-Out: In "Punk Rock Girl":"We asked for Mojo Nixon
They said 'He don't work here!'
We said 'If you don't got Mojo Nixon'
Then your store could use some fixin'!"- "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies" has one to Hüsker Dü with the line "So Bob and Greg and Grant you should beware."
- The Doors were parodied in two of their songs. In the opening dialogue of "Bitchin' Camaro," a cover band that turns "Love Me Two Times" into a song about AIDS is mentioned. Then in "If You Love Somebody Set Them on Fire," the "You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar" segments are a reference to "Light My Fire."
- Elvis in "Graceland" (obviously) and also in "Smokin' Banana Peels"
"Talk to me about Elvis."- In "My Many Smells," there's the line "See me, hear me, touch me, smell me."
- "That Jonny Wurster kid" in "Stuart" was named after Jon Wurster, who later went on to be the drummer of Superchunk.
- "The Fez" includes the lyric "There's a time for taking and a time for giving / but ripping off the Butthole Surfers is how we make our living" - fittingly, the song itself is sort of done In the Style of Butthole Surfers. The same song also parodies lyrics from Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues" ("I'd like to help you son, but you smell like a goat") and Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" ("'scuse me while I puke and die").
- "Beach Party Vietnam" mentions a young couple named Frankie and Annette. The 1960s Beach Party film series starred Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
- "If You Love Somebody, Set Them On Fire" was titled as a play on Sting's "If You Love Somebody, Set Them Free".
- The band's name itself is inspired by the novel Song of Solomon, where the main character, Macon Dead III, is nicknamed Milkman.
- The Something Song: "Beach Song,", "Badger Song", "Guitar Song", "The Conspiracy Song", "Blues Song", ...
- Step Up to the Microphone: At first, Rodney Anonymous took the majority of lead vocals, with Joe Jack Talcum singing a few songs per album (including "Punk Rock Girl", arguably their most famous song). Joe started having an increasing vocal presence on their later albums, and actually sang more songs on the album Soul Rotation than Rodney did.
- The Stoner: "Smokin' Banana Peels"
- Stylistic Suck: Joe Jack's solos were given towards this, from the deliberately out-of-tune, overly simple "Punk Rock Girl" to the outright clamorous "Instant Club Hit (You'll Dance to Anything)" in which he parodied Art Rock guitarists.
- Surf Rock: Parodied in "Beach Song," where they complain about wasting the summer at the beach
- Also parodied in "Beach Party Vietnam" where the speaker sings about cooking hot dogs with napalm and surfing with the Viet Cong (possibly a reference to the line "Charlie Don't Surf" from Apocalypse Now and The Clash's song that was written from the line.)
- Take That!: "Instant Club Hit (You'll Dance To Anything)" is made of these, but the rant at the end is the perfect cap to them:You'll dance to anything by any bunch of stupid Europeans, who come over here, with their big hairdos, intent on taking our money, instead of giving your cash, where it belongs: to a decent, American artist, like myself..."
- "Anderson, Walkman, Buttholes and How!"
- "Tiny Town" included a now obscure dig at Hardcore Punk band The F.U.'s - the band in question received fan backlash for pro-conservative lyrics on their album My America, thus explaining why the bigoted narrators of the song "hate punks" but "love the F.U.'s".
- In the latter part of "Now Everybody's Me," the narrator fears he's going to turn into a lesbian left-handed midget eskimo albino. Towards the end, he feels himself shrinking, gets the urge to build an igloo, and feels his skin turning white and eyes turning red... but only panics to the point of screaming "NOOOOOOOOOO!" when he realizes he feels like buying a Suzanne Vega album.
- Threatening Shark: The beach is thoroughly derided in "Beach Song" for its stupid sand, stupid fish, and stupid people but the worst part is that the speaker gave his ice cream to a shark and now has nothing to eat.
- Three Chords and the Truth: Subverted. Quite a lot of songs use just a few chords but the "truth" delivered is pretty subjective.
- Tuckerization: "That Jonny Wurster kid" in "Stuart" is named after Jon Wurster, the drummer for Superchunk and a friend of the band.
- Went to the Great X in the Sky: "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies""Gonna send 'em all to that big folk festival in the sky"
- Wisdom from the Gutter: As The Dead Milkmen were often deliberately crude and ridiculous, it's pretty shocking when a song like "The Secret of Life," which is about the speaker's interstellar romp with a space alien, is genuinely sweet and provides the message that there is no secret to life, since secrets only serve to turn people against each other.
- "If I Had A Gun" is from the same album (Soul Rotation) and while one might expect it to be along the same lines as "Violent School" where the speaker rambles about how awesome violence is, it's actually a pretty interesting contemplation about how the speaker would be different if he owned a gun and had the power to destroy.
- "Life Is Shit" is for the most part exactly what you'd expect from the title... and then the last verse features completely sincere lyrics about the pain of missing departed loved ones.
- Word Salad Lyrics: Invoked, subverted, satirized over and over again. "The Fez" does all of these in a single song.
- Yandere: Again, "If You Love Somebody, Set Them On Fire"
