the dead milkmen | "the pit" | bucky fellini | 1987
when i graduated from the japanese prison into minerva deland middle school (pictured above), i also graduated from childhood obliviousness into teenage angst. what fun. new times called for new tunes. i was bored of the trendy top 40 songs broadcast on 98 wpxy and went in search of “the new wave”. i guess i should say the newer wave. the new philosophy was that it must be good if no one i knew had heard of it before. (thus began my run in the frenzied race amongst the disaffected musical idealists to out-do each other.)
my first source for “alternative” music was corey kemp, a neighbor. corey’s older brother was already at the local community college and had educated himself on the “what else” that was out there. i didn’t like corey’s brother (he punched me once when i was in sixth grade) so i always made fun of the bands he liked: the dead this, the dead that. i may not have liked him, but i wasn’t against mooching tapes off him when he wasn’t around. corey and i made a habit of pilfering his tapes, copying them, and returning them before he could find out.
to start myself on this brave new path of consumerism i chose the most absurd-sounding band in derek’s collection: the dead milkmen.
