Michael Azerrad — Our Band Could Be Your Life

Nearly a decade after my love for punk-derivative music (but not straightforward punk, because of my budding superiority complex) was shaped by the bands featured in Michael Azerrad’s seminal book Our Band Could Be Your Life, I finally read it this week.

It’s an amazing book, not only for fans of this sort of music, but also for fans of stories in general, especially those about underdogs. But who am I kidding, nobody’s going to read it because I like it¹. Besides, nobody reads anymore. So, to do my bit, here’s a list of bands featured in the book, with their (in my own humble, and, of course, personal opinion) best albums. I have starred my favourite artists and releases within that list to further shorten this shortlist.

1. Black Flag — My War
2. Minutemen* — Double Nickels on the Dime* (The greatest double album ever released, in my opinion. ~12 songs for each member of the band and 10 songs of Chaff, and an average song length of ~1.5 mins, this is what critics call a tour-de-force.)
3. Mission of Burma — Signals, Calls, and Marches*
4. Minor Threat — Minor Threat
5. Hüsker Dü *— Zen Arcade* (especially for those with nostalgia for Green Day’s American Idiot, esp. Jesus of Suburbia. I think of this as a non-political, and better, American Idiot that was released before American Idiot.)
6. The Replacements — Pleased to Meet Me* (not covered by the book, because it’s a major label release after the guitarist Bob Stinson was booted from the band, and therefore considered impure by the underground.)
7. Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation
8. Butthole Surfers (I don’t recommend anything by this band)
9. Big Black — Songs About Fucking
10. Dinosaur Jr — You’re Living All Over Me
11. Fugazi* — 13 Songs* (the better second innings of Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat, and Guy Picciotto of Rites of Spring.)
12. Mudhoney — Touch Me I’m Sick* (the band themselves acknowledge they’ve struggled to match the intensity and quality of their first song.)
13. Beat Happening (can’t recommend this band; can’t recommend this style of music.)

¹ If you’re considering not reading it because you haven’t heard the bands in it, let me assure you it’s not a prerequisite. In fact, I think discovering these artists while reading the book is better than having listened to them already. As the author himself notes, the book was written because most books about the American guitar-based underground seem to go from Woodstock through punk in the mid-to-late 70’s directly to Nirvana and alternative hitting the mainstream in the 90’s. The 80’s were hardly considered, although they were instrumental in creating the concept of DIY² (do it yourself) music. So yeah, it was assumed that readers wouldn’t have heard these bands, or even if they had, like me, that they wouldn’t appreciate the circumstances in which they came up, and how influential they were (I had no idea).

² Before they signed on to major labels, all the bands in this book made their own music, recorded it themselves, released, distributed, toured, promoted, publicised, everything themselves. Having aborted an attempt at being a bedroom-only musician in the internet age, when publicity is easy, I have tremendous respect for these bands. That they reached a teenager in Mumbai in the late 2000’s and inspired a DIY approach in that guy is testament to the quality of their music and the quality of their thought process.