Book reviews
Music from the 1980s is usually categorized as one of the blandest of the century, full of enough mindless rot to choke a yak. The charts were dominated by bloated rock and R&B spin-offs that many pray to forget.
Punk, which had rebelled against the cookie-cutter pop-rock of the likes of Journey and Foreigner only a few years before, had been abducted and converted into New Wave by the very industry it set out to destroy.
This is the landscape upon which Michael Azerrad’s “Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the Indie Underground 1981-1991” operates.
The book, recently released in paperback, covers the music scene that actually made a difference during that time period. It covers the bands that flourished in the world of small record companies, slipshod venues and a grapevine of dedicated fans who supported the music.
Overall, the book consists of 13 long essays, each on a different band from the era, bookended by an introduction and an epilogue. Beginning with Black Flag and ending with Beat Happening, it covers the history of indie rock from its birth in obscurity to its death with the mainstream “alternative” movement.
Each band is covered meticulously, and Azerrad is a good enough writer to show the relevance of each group without slipping into the cheap hyperbole of a booster. He doesn’t shy away from the moments when the bands occasionally act like the pampered jerks they were supposed to be an antidote to, and he has the guts to claim that some bands where right in leaving their indie roots and moving to the majors.
While such a statement would be taken as heresy by the devoted, Azerrad shows it to be the only choice left in the context of the times.
As for the bands themselves, the book makes no pretense of being thorough, but it does cover important ground. Azerrad begins with the second wave of punk — “hard-core –” and the band Black Flag, that movement’s fathers and the founders of SST Records. He then moves on to the more eclectic sounds of the Minutemen (whose lyrics provided the book’s title) and to Boston’s criminally unknown Mission of Burma.
In the Sonic Youth essay, Azerrad gives great care to his treatment of the band’s decision to leave the indie scene. One of the few bands mentioned in the book that still exist today, Sonic Youth left the scene just as it was beginning to die. Their decision is presented as abandoning a sinking ship rather than as a grab for more fame and money (though it got the latter, the members never gained much more of the former).
One of the more interesting essays focuses on the Butthole Surfers, the bizarre Texas band that made music into performance art. Though they seemed to fit mainstream music like a chicken fits a glove, the band eventually joined the majors, though not without first making their own twisted contribution to the underground scene.
The last two bands covered are Mudhoney and Beat Happening, who helped define the Northwest rock scene. The Mudhoney essay is the only time Azarred digresses, as he talks more about their label, Sub Pop, and about the Seattle music scene in general than about the band. At least it’s a subject he’s knowledgeable about, as his last two books were “Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana” and “Screaming Life: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene.”
The book deftly depicts an era that is still influential today, minus the aggrandizing and pretensions that a less-skilled writer would have used. Or, in the words of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, “We were part of nothing. … We got cheap guitars and screwdrivers and turned the amps up to 10.”
What more needs to be said?
Ryan Nyburg is a freelance writer. His opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Emerald.