Crawdaddy! The Magazine of Rock

In a family tree of popular music that begins with great-grandfather Robert Johnson, stretches down to Chuck Berry, branches off to Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Dylan, Zeppelin, the Ramones, and ends with the birth of Green Day, the Descendents would be the crazy musical uncle, the one who is 45 and in a perpetual state of relationship breakup; lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment with two Fender Stratocasters, one Les Paul, and a Pearl drumset displayed in the living room; mourns the death of Keith Moon each September; wears a white t-shirt and jeans regardless of the occasion; and still maintains his teenage bodyweight of 150 lbs. despite a diet of Ramen noodles, Mexican takeout, and Coors Light. You may not always respect this uncle or trust him around your girlfriend, but he’s the one who put that Sex Pistols album under the Christmas tree when you were still in preschool, he’s the one who first placed the guitar in your hands, and he’s the reason rock music is a part of your life at all.

Perhaps Green Day did not wear out any record needles pining over the Descendents’ 1985 album I Don’t Want to Grow Up, and they might not mention them as a significant influence, but without the Descendents there never would have been a genre of melodic pop-punk for Green Day to capitalize upon. They came first, like it or not, influential or not. They just did it with a little less media attention, a little less theatrics, and maybe a little more respect.

Back in high school, my basement-dwelling musical cohorts and I used to call the Descendents “Happycore.” They were punk-rock, yes, but with an affinity for finger-plucking bass harmonics and ratta-tat-tat drum fills, the kind of music that makes a crowd want to bop up and down but not necessarily slam into each other. Coupled with their sputtering tempo and grungy, bare chords were playfully un-punk, damn near uplifting, Beatle-esque melodies (if the Beatles were souped-up on Red Bull and/or a couple shots of exceptionally potent habanera sauce), and their lyrics told less than controversial tales of benign heartbreak, teen angst, and parental malaise that, unlike their mohawk-and-combat boot wearing brethren, frequently traversed the subterranean world of nerdom. The Descendents are just like us, we thought, middleclass suburbanites loitering at the 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts, eating sugar packets and wishing they had something extraordinary to bitch about.

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