Milk It! Collected Musings on the Alternative Rock Explosion of the 90’s by Jim DeRogatis (Da Capo)
To Jim—Now It’s Your Turn. Best, Lester
But while Bangs’s early demise meant that others would ultimately shape his literary legacy, DeRogatis has the luxury of shaping his own. Milk It! is loosely organized as a primer on the rise and fall of alt-rock, but it’s also DeRogatis’s first attempt to compile his work in a manner befitting a critic who’s made his mark. It’s a greatest hits set—part anthology, part autobiography—similar in form to Richard Meltzer’s A Whore Just Like the Rest and Nick Tosches’s Reader.
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Milk It! doesn’t work as a comprehensive history of music in the 90s—the focus is too narrow, and recaps of the careers of Wire, John Cale, and Kraftwerk bog the narrative down. By DeRogatis’s own admission, he views the era largely through the prism of the hometown scene, devoting big chunks of the book to Smashing Pumpkins (“Melancholy and the Pear-Shaped Boy”) and Steve Albini and Urge Overkill (“Positive Bleeding”) and a decent amount of space to the likes of Red Red Meat, the Jesus Lizard, and Tortoise (all marshaled under the subheading “Freaks and Geeks”). For Request he constructed a month-by-month chronicle on the rise of Veruca Salt (“The Building of a Buzz Band”), and on behalf of the Bay Area mag BAM he took a journey into the avaricious mind-set of Liz Phair (“Sex in Rock 101: Selling the Maiden Phair”). For all the ink spilled trying to explain Phair’s recent Matrix-produced sellout, you needn’t read further than DeRogatis’s 1995 piece on the canny Oberlin grad, where—despite a healthy respect for her music—he exposes the extent of her Faustian ambitions.
There’s nothing this eloquent—or melodramatic—in all of Milk It! DeRogatis is not contemporary rock criticism’s great gonzo journalist, gutter poet, or romantic visionary—that is to say, not its Lester Bangs. But he’s enthusiastically assumed the role of its most dedicated journeyman and unapologetic gadfly. And when the problem with music is that one has to settle for Stephan Jenkins instead of Lou Reed, that might be a worthy enough charge.
