Descendents

Hey, you with the Green Day T-shirt and blink-182 tattoo! Check out the band that perfected pop-punk before it was fashionable. Descendents' brand of brainy, melodic punk started shouting a message to the suburban geek nation in the early '80s with ranch-house rockers like "Suburban Home." The punks that dared to sing in tune also said "later" to trendy negativity, instead offering chin-up tunes full of positive affirmations, like the sonic letter to the lovelorn "Clean Sheets." True rebels in a sea of hardcore soundalikes, Descendents even dared to cover the Beach Boys, bringing pure punk drive to the SoCal kings' classic "Wendy."

Next Steps shows that the West Coast punk princes are all heart.

When most L.A. hardcore kids griped about jobs, school, and parents, Descendents let the world know punks need love too. The straight-up let's-get-hitched message of "Marriage" is as heart-on-sleeve as punk gets. True to their debut's title, singer Milo (the bespectacled cartoon geek on their album covers) did indeed go to college, but three years later Descendents were up to their old tricks with the Buzzcocks bounce of the unabashedly romantic "In Love This Way." Later, the smarty singer left again to become a biochemist(!), but his second return marked a comeback that rocked harder than ever with hardcore bangers like "Coffee Mug."

Hear how the band changed and grew over time in Deep Cuts.

Milo was never one to dumb things down, and Descendents' lyrical approach reached its intellectual peak with the philosophical album All and songs like "Jealous of the World," as Bad Religion took notes. When Milo took his second hiatus, the other Descendents regrouped with a new singer under that album's name, and All pushed punk's boundaries even further — check out their hardcore-meets-surf-music riff-fest "Gnutheme." Once Milo was back on board, the band rocked all the way into the 21st century, still championing the cause of the brainy geek at the losers' lunch table. The 2004 tune "Mass Nerder" proudly pledges allegiance to one nerd nation under geekdom, with liberty and pocket protectors for all.

Descendents spent their lives disproving punk stereotypes, making music that embraces such seemingly un-punk concepts as romance, ambition, positivity, and brainpower. They delivered hardcore from its musical prison at the same time, proving to punk purists that it was OK to match catchy melodies to Ramones-regulation ramalama riffs and mile-a-minute tempos. Through three different decades, that little cartoon geek on the album covers was a symbol of pride for generations of kids who thought they were uncool until they starting following Descendents' punk path, and the stepping stones are all compiled right here. When pop-punk started making big bucks in the '90s, the band never tried to cash in on the scene that they made possible; instead, they just plowed on ahead at their own pace, still following their #1 rule: do your own thing.