Azerrad — Our Band Could Be Your Life

Author: Michael Azerrad
Title: Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991
Year: 2001
Type: Book (Little, Brown)

Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991 is a book by the journalist Michael Azerrad, a contributor to Rolling Stone, published by Little, Brown in 2001. It is a history of the American independent rock underground of the 1980s, told through thirteen bands, one chapter each from Black Flag to Beat Happening, and built from Azerrad’s interviews with band members and from the fanzines, newspapers and books of the period. Publishers Weekly summarized its argument as showing that the sound credited to Nirvana’s Nevermind (1991) had grown out of almost fifteen years of work by independent bands, and Robert Christgau, in the Village Voice, described the scene it portrays as unprecedented in its entrepreneurship. Both reviewed it favorably, The Observer listed it among the fifty best music books in 2006, and Roger Miller of Mission of Burma said it was one of the reasons his band re-formed in 2002. Christgau also wrote that the book leaves out the audience that bought the music, and Steve Albini, one of its subjects, said that choosing representative bands reproduces a star system.

Azerrad, a contributor to Rolling Stone and the author of the Nirvana biography Come as You Are (1993), said he wrote the book after watching a television history of rock that went from Talking Heads directly to Nirvana.¹ Little, Brown published it in 2001.²

Publishers Weekly summarized the argument as showing that the sound credited to Nevermind had grown out of almost fifteen years of work by independent bands such as Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Minor Threat and the Replacements.³ Christgau wrote that the scene the book describes was unprecedented in its entrepreneurship and that everyone in it took part in selling the music.⁴

Azerrad chose the thirteen bands so that each would represent, in his words, “a critical sound, sensibility, personality, or city.”⁵ The chapters cover Black Flag, the Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, the Replacements, Sonic Youth, the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening. They are built from his interviews with band members and from fanzines, newspapers and books of the period.⁶ Christgau wrote that the interviewing was extensive enough to make the material new even to readers who had been part of the scene.⁷ The title is the opening line of the Minutemen’s “History Lesson – Part II”, a Mike Watt song on Double Nickels on the Dime, and the book is dedicated to D. Boon of the Minutemen and Bob Stinson of the Replacements.⁸ Its epigraph, from William Blake, is a line about creating one’s own system so as not to be enslaved by another’s.⁹

The reviews in Publishers Weekly and the Village Voice were favorable. Publishers Weekly called the book “an astute insider’s account,” with the reservation that band biography outweighs musical and cultural analysis in it, and Christgau gave it a “well-earned thumbs-up.”¹⁰ The Observer listed it among the fifty best music books in 2006, and for its tenth anniversary Azerrad organized a concert at the Bowery Ballroom in New York at which younger bands played music from the book.¹¹ In the 2019 audiobook the chapters are read by artists who cite the chapters’ bands as influences, with Azerrad reading the Fugazi chapter himself.¹¹ Roger Miller said the book was one of the reasons Mission of Burma re-formed in 2002, and Bob Mould of Hüsker Dü called it “a really great document.”¹²

Christgau and Albini objected to the book’s scope and method. Christgau wrote that “Azerrad’s gift is detail, not overview”: the book leaves out the audience that bought the music, it sets aside “relatively conventional” bands such as R.E.M., and it treats the major labels as alike, though the majors differed from one another and had compromised the independence of indie rock since the early 1980s.¹³ Albini, whose band Big Black has a chapter, said that singling out representative bands reproduces “the star system” in a scene made up of dozens of bands in several cities.¹⁴

Key contributions

• A history of the American independent underground from 1981 to 1991, told through thirteen band profiles, which Publishers Weekly read as tracing 1990s alternative rock to the independent bands of the 1980s.
• An account of a scene that Christgau described as unprecedented in its entrepreneurship, with everyone in it taking part in selling the music.
• A history told through representative bands, thirteen of them, each chosen for a sound, sensibility, personality or city and each documented through interviews with its members.

See also

• England’s Dreaming — the 1991 history of British punk
• Please Kill Me — the 1996 oral history of American punk
• Punk — the genre