arc03: 'THEIR BANDS COULD BE YOUR LIFE' An I/V With Michael Azerrad (The Big Issue, 2016)
I hadn’t planned to upload this feature (an interview with Michael Azerrad on the fifteenth anniversary of his book ‘Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991’), but it was nice to find it on an old hard drive. I have very fond memories of reading ‘Our Band…’ for the first time, having picked up a copy for the Butthole Surfers and Dinosaur Jr sections alone and then having some formative ‘oh now I get it’ moments in the guts of the book. So when ‘Our Band..’ went pseudo-viral on twitter last week in a ‘choose your favourite three bands from the book and then yell at each other about it’ kinda way, the time seemed right to post. This interview was conducted over email in 2016, and originally published in The Big Issue.
In 2001, Michael Azerrad released a book that chronicled the people and communities of the 1980’s punk and indie rock underground. It was titled Our Band Could Be Your Life, and through the stories of artists such as Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr, and Sonic Youth, formed a context for a group of thirteen bands that all had, in one way or another, a united purpose to do it themselves. The book’s fiercely DIY focus is reflected in its timelines. Azerrad ends each band’s story when they sign to a major label, and the book’s dateline stops in 1991, when Nirvana’s Nevermind went gold and began the marketing of these subcultures as ‘alt-rock.’
One of the book’s greatest strengths (beyond the series of first-hand accounts that span from the hilarious to the tragic) lies in its grouping of a set of disparate-sounding bands under a common ideological theme. Rarely has the twee folk of Beat Happening been written about alongside the absurdist bent of Butthole Surfers, but Azerrad wrote of the ideological connection that seems fated to be missed. For the people of the ‘80s US underground, in seeing a world of hopeless conservatism framed by Reagan’s America, they turned to crafting communities they could succeed in by their own criteria. As Azerrad states in the book’s introduction: “The indie underground made a modest way of life not just attractive, but a downright moral imperative.” When I spoke to him via email earlier this year, Azerrad noted that the punks of the 1980’s were not just a reflection of their time, but predictors of the future.
“It's a good idea to pay attention to developments in music culture, because they will play out in analogous ways in the rest of culture,” he says. “Thanks to advances in technology — notably the photocopier and more affordable recording gear — the early punks and indie-rockers were able to control their own media; now everybody is doing that. So indie music was a visionary development.”
Fifteen years on from the book’s first edition, the influence of the communities Azerrad chronicled in 2001 can be seen in the backwater music scenes of the cities we reside in today. Monochrome flyers advertising the weekend’s punk shows pile on record store counters; home-made t-shirts are sold at the doors of makeshift music venues; and records are self-recorded and distributed from inner-city bedrooms (albeit, via Bandcamp rather than mail order). Thus, the staples of DIY laid out in the 1980’s by people like Ian McKaye (Dischord Records) or Greg Ginn (SST) live on, even as the forms of technology change.
“There are countless musical communities all over the planet, [and] I'm sure some of them took inspiration, directly or indirectly, from the community profiled in Our Band Could Be Your Life,” Azerrad says. “But the concept of DIY, and communities based around it, has been exponentially expanded and enabled by the internet. As a consequence, the concept of DIY is now deeply entrenched in our culture and there's nothing nostalgic about it — it's one of the most progressive aspects of our society.”
In Australia, the DIY flag is flown as strongly as anywhere in the world, with record labels like Sydney’s RIP Society and Paradise Daily run independently from the owner’s living rooms (the latter of which even produces all their cassettes by individual duplication). Such labels (and several others across the country such as Aarght and Eternal Soundcheck) continue the legacy of the ‘80s underground – from The Minutemen’s famed thrifty philosophy of “jamming econo”, to Big Black’s fiercely anti-industry approach – but do so by representing bands with fresh and modern takes on their craft.
As in any influential cultural movement, the other side of the coin of this period has been the current-day co-opting of the sonic and visual cues of the ‘80s punks. While slavish tribute and appropriation is hardly a new phenomenon, it seems particularly at odds with what the DIY forbearers established, and Azerrad agrees. “That sort of thing has been going on ever since people started making art,” he says. “Ironically, it's a very conservative notion, to resist change and cling to the ways of the past. The people who really get it are the ones who make original music that's inspired by punk rock but not influenced by it; that's a key distinction.”
Like the communities it profiled, Our Band… has been an inspirational book for many, and it remains an insightful read. Even when narrowing in on the minutiae of the people involved in that decade of music – from The Replacements’ commercial self-sabotage to the straight-edge movement led by Minor Threat – it never loses sight of the bigger picture. The ‘80s indie underground may have built the foundation for what was to come in the 1990’s, but it also gave direction and purpose for generations of disenfranchised youths. It’s hard to imagine a more loving and authoritative introduction to the era, but Azerrad plays coy to such claims: “I just try to write as well as I can,” he says. “And let other people decide whether the work is authoritative or lasting.”
+++other updates___
—we’ll be fuckin’ off to Italy for the rest of September for a trip that’s one-part holiday, one-part research for the next novel. planning a couple interviews while i’m over there, hopefully including some discussion with milano-based punks kobra and their related collective Sentiero Futuro Autoproduzione which i’ll publish in some form here. if you have any tips between torino, milano, roma, napoli give me a yell!
—on that note & as a heads up: any zine orders that come through after the 9th of September won’t be sent out until October. i might bring some tapes & zines over to the EU in any case, so if you want a discounted postage rate and i can send easy enough from italy let me know!