art, illustrated by artist Melissa Bell, on February 13, 1989. To promote the single, the band guested on Club MTV with host Downtown Julie Brown, a show typically relegated for dance artists. The channel demanded the quartet lip-sync their taped performance, and to agree, the band got MTV to agree to some conditions: a tuba for Linderman, an oversized drum kit that Sabatino ends up playing little of, and more. The band viewed the opportunity as a joke, and still found it "hilarious" years later. Jason Heller wrote about the song in a 2012 piece for The A.V. Club examining classic singles. He called it "a classic pop song: well crafted, well played, well produced, and impeccably infectious." Heller praised the tune as "rife with smart, subversive flourishes: The asthmatic accordion. Genaro's strangulated un-solo. And some sly, mischievous runs from founding bassist Dave "Blood" Schulthise." AllMusic's Ned Raggett, reviewing Beelzebubba, singled out the song for praise, calling it "near-perfect" and commenting, "Sprightly and catchy, it mixes the unexpectedly tender, sweet side of the band with the usual drawling humor." The song has been covered by MxPx, Ben Gibbard, Diesel Boy, and Streetlight Manifesto. The song was licensed as featured music in the video game Tony Hawk's Project 8 (2006), and used on the Fox television show Raising Hope. Legacy "Punk Rock Girl" was one of the first punk rock crossover hits, and balances between the genre's early days and its poppier, more mainstream interpretation. The Dead Milkmen were among the first artists to gain attention playing this more melodic strain of punk, like fellow genre pioneers NOFX and Green Day. However, Genaro declined to be considered part of the "pop punk" scene; in a 2015 interview, he stated he "[doesn't] really think that we fit into that genre. I don't know what genre that we fit into". The band's impact on later musicians, specifically through the wide popularity of "Punk Rock Girl", is evident. MXPX covered the song in 2009 on their album On the Cover II. Tom DeLonge, guitarist for Blink-182, recalls that his first concert was the Dead Milkmen and mentions "Punk Rock Girl" fondly in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2019. Steve Huey of AllMusic writes that the single was "one of the first comedy rock songs from the alternative world to break through to a wider audience; in that sense, it prefigured the post-grunge breakthrough