Cynic Rock (or "How I stopped Hating and Learned to Love Irony")

I've been thinking of some of the strange music I was listening to in the early 90's. I'm talking about that strange brand of punk infused college rock that crept through the floor boards into your ears one way or another. This was before coffee houses flourished and then died at the hand of corporations, when spoken word became a new word for unstructured poetry/ranting. It was one of those strange times in which similar ideas and ways of thinking seemed to be coalescing.
Bands like The Dead Milkmen, King Missile,Camper Van Beethoven, Bongwater, and eventually Ween were answering that Frank Zappa question "Does humor Belong in Music?" The answer was, yes, Frank, eventually.
These bands could only survive in the realm of College Radio stations (prior to the nineties "alternative rock" boom, and the eventual co-opting of that once as of yet untouched breeding ground of music) and tour on the buzz of a track like "Detachable Penis." Often the singers sometimes offered more of a humorous monologue than a verse chorus verse approach to songwriting, but it was different, and it helped you see that music didn't have to be written in a certain way, it didn't even have to be that good. It was all about intention.
It was the King Missile's and Dead Milkman of the world which exposed me to that "thumb your nose at the establishment" quality that is so enjoyable in Rock n' Roll. No, it wasn't the sneering, gobbing, pogoing antics of the Sex Pistols. The only song I knew from the Clash was "Rock the Casbah" - and it bothered me because I didn't know what they were saying when they sang "Shariff wont like it" (and I could still be wrong for that matter).
The Cynic Rockers seemed to posses that certain type of self confidence that most of us feel as teenagers - a.)I'm smarter than most of the world, b.)most of the world are idiots and hypocrites, c.) I'm gonna laugh at them and make fun of them and they wont even realize it, because ...(see A and B).
Albums like Beezlebuba possessed the strange allure that one of Monty Python's LP's, or a Cheech and Chong album had. There hidden in the hundreds of feet of tape existed something you were sure your parents wouldn't get, but you did - and that was all that mattered.
I would listen to these albums, copied made from copies, that I had stolen from my brother, and longed to be out of High School and on the college airwaves playing all the music I saw fit. Or I at least wish I could have been as smart as Christian Slater in "Pump Up the Volume" and built my own pirate radio station - the Man be damned!
They say that humor is the truest form of the truth, and I believe we realize this early on, which is why those who are clever enough can make someone laugh when they want to kick your ass. And maybe that was what was so freeing about this music, it some how represented the truth you knew was out there, but couldn't quite get to yet. If, as Harry Hardon put it "Truth is a Virus," I guess Cynic Rock was the scratchy throat and dry eyes I got before music really infected me.