Robert Christgau praised the album, describing the music as "crude ("Everybody start at the same time, ready"), unremitting ("Sex Bomb" has seven words and lasts close to eight minutes), and immensely charitable and good-humored (Iggy with Jerry's soul, I'm not kidding)."

"[2] Another reviewer described the band's performance on the album as "[d]rawing upon the same brand of frustrated nihilism one associates with such SoCal contemporaries as Fear and the Germs" and argues that "Flipper broods where their peers seethe, slowing tempos and moaning rather than spitting their despairing lyrics.

"[12] Elsewhere, in Noel Gardner's review for NME, he described the band as one "who made a punishing virtue out of being sloppy, offbeat and imprecise.

Flipper existed at the epicentre of the Californian punk scene in the early ’80s, but as their hardcore peers sped up, they slowed down.

A simple concept that helped to create a remarkable, incomparable signature sound, one which trickled down into the musical visions of, most famously, Black Flag and Nirvana."

He calls the album "their definitive statement [...] Lyrically a bipolar flip between ugly negativity and lightbulb-moment optimism (“Life is the only thing worth living for!”), musically, Generic turns almost unrelated layers of free expression into a blackened mass of enduring power.