{"id":15894,"date":"2011-05-19T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T12:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=15894"},"modified":"2018-12-12T15:01:10","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T20:01:10","slug":"michael-azerrad-on-our-band-could-be-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/05\/19\/michael-azerrad-on-our-band-could-be-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Azerrad on \u2018Our Band Could Be Your Life\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published in 2001, Michael Azerrad\u2019s <\/em>Our Band Could Be Your Life<\/a> featured the story of thirteen seminal indie bands from 1981\u20131991. Since then, his accounts of the decade\u2019s underground do-it-yourself punk ethos has inspired a generation of music geeks, connoisseurs, and professionals\u2014many of whom have gone on to found or play in various contemporary indie bands of note. On Sunday, a ten-year anniversary show<\/a> at the Bowery Ballroom will unite fourteen such bands\u2014from the Dirty Projectors to Titus Andronicus\u2014each covering songs by one of the groups he documented. I recently sat down with Azerrad, an old friend and former bandmate, to talk about his book\u2019s ongoing role in the music being made today.<\/em><\/p>\n

Just the other day, I was reading your book in a cafe, and a waiter who saw it immediately came up wanting to talk. You describe underground indie fans back in the eighties wearing the SST record-label T-shirt, or sporting a Black Flag tattoo. In a sense, to certain people, your book\u2019s now as powerful an identifier, even ten years after being published. What\u2019s going on with that? <\/strong><\/p>\n

To have read that book means that you\u2019ve been exposed to a certain philosophy, and odds are you agree with some of it. It spells out an ethos inherited from those eighties underground indie bands\u2014opting out of the corporate machinery, keeping money inside the community, thinking for yourself, doing it yourself. You can apply those ideas to lots of things besides music\u2014that’s why the book is called Our Band Could Be Your Life<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This same waiter paused to ask if I was reading your book for class. What\u2019s it like to know that Our Band Could Be Your Life <\/em>is now thought of as required classroom reading?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had a very classical education, so part of me is very dubious: You\u2019re reading my book in a class? You should be reading about the Revolutionary War, or studying Plato! But I suppose the story is part of cultural history. The mandate to think for yourself, and to do it yourself, and to live responsibly\u2014that\u2019s a thread woven deep in our culture. I asked Ian MacKaye (of Minor Threat and Fugazi) if he\u2019d ever read Walden<\/em>. He didn\u2019t know anything about it, but philosophically he\u2019s a Thoreau descendant to the core.<\/p>\n

Obviously times have changed since your book first came out. Has that affected how young musicians now read it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since then, the term indie<\/em> has become almost meaningless.\u00a0People in the musical community wrestle with the concept endlessly. But if you read the book, you\u2019ll find out what it really means to be indie. A lot of musicians tell me that they tried to have a career in indie music, got discouraged by how difficult it is, and then read the book and realized how much harder it was back then. They say, \u201cIf they could get through that, then I can get through this.\u201d So it\u2019s an inspirational book, like Norman Vincent Peale! But really, things really are much easier now. There\u2019s a whole network of clubs, and it\u2019s easier to record and distribute music. There\u2019s a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like the David Bowie quote you often like to bring up\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not who does it first, it\u2019s who does it second.\u201d<\/p>\n

In thinking about lineages, how are the bands performing on Sunday descendants of the bands profiled in your book? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The most lasting significance of the eighties American indie scene might have been the way these bands conducted their careers. The point wasn\u2019t to play loud and fast; the point was to make the music they wanted to make, without compromise, to find and cultivate an audience for it, and to live within their means so they could continue to do exactly what they wanted to do and not be beholden to anyone but themselves.\u00a0That’s really what the best indie bands today are emulating.<\/p>\n

Also, much of what the bands in this book did was to make very unconventional music that attracted unconventional people\u2014or maybe even showed conventional people a different mode of thinking. Not necessarily because of anything in the lyrics, but just because of how challenging and unorthodox the music was.<\/p>\n

I think a lot of indie bands now are similarly elevating and challenging people\u2019s minds, just by the nature of the music they make. The Dirty Projectors are a great example, or Animal Collective. I really believe in the power of music\u2014and I mean literally the power of musical tones\u2014to rearrange the way you can think.<\/p>\n

Your book mentions that the members of Fugazi had an earlier project called Rites of Spring, which recalls the riot\u2014the literal physical violence\u2014inspired by the musical tones of Stravinsky\u2019s composition.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And that sort of power can be used for good or ill. Fugazi\u2019s drummer would sometimes do a roll around the drums, and not end with a cymbal crash but with the little ting! <\/em>of a ship\u2019s bell he\u2019d carry around. <\/em>And you thought, Wow, every drum roll doesn\u2019t have to end with a crash. Which is not a huge thing in itself, but as a metaphor, rather powerful: defy expectations, think creatively, be alert.<\/p>\n

The bands in Sunday\u2019s lineup write songs that are so different from those described in your book. To me, at least, this second generation\u2019s music seems much more \u201cacademic.\u201d They\u2019re making incredibly complex music-theory decisions; they\u2019re making songs that the academy can embrace.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think the whole idea of punk and indie music was not to sound loud and bludgeoning and aggressive, but to go wherever your muse led you, and to develop some kind of emotional and physical infrastructure that would allow you to do that. By emotional infrastructure, I mean that you had to feel free enough to make this music. It wasn\u2019t necessarily about someone with a distorted guitar and two or three chords. During the Reagan era, people were so complacent. That\u2019s why Sonic Youth called their album Daydream Nation. <\/em>At the time, we needed some angry bands to hop up and down, and go, No, no!<\/p>\n

Interesting. So anger was rebellious back then, but not as much now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Even with the smiley-face era of the sixties, the Age of Aquarius and so forth, Vietnam was going on, and racial inequities were widespread. So you had groups like the Velvet Underground and the Stooges screaming and making really ugly music because someone had to point out that things were not in fact hunky-dory. That was rebellious\u2014most people did not want to hear that. But over the past decade something has flipped, and mainstream society has become ugly and angry, and simplistic. Underground culture\u2019s therefore taking the opposite tack, almost by definition. There is <\/em>an academic, pointy-headed aspect to the music of some of these bands, and I think that\u2019s good because we live in stupid, angry times and something has to stand in opposition to that, just like those older bands stood in opposition to complacency. Stupid, angry people are the tail that\u2019s wagging the dog right now. So the most rebellious thing you can do these days is to be smart and peaceful.<\/p>\n

Your book details an \u201cus-versus-them\u201d mentality in the eighties underground scene which really doesn\u2019t seem to exist anywhere nearly as much in contemporary indie bands. Does that mean these recent bands aren\u2019t quite the heirs one would hope for? Have they sold out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The line\u2019s definitely blurred. Now you have this little Brooklyn indie band called Matt and Kim, or Neon Indian, who have recorded for Green Label Sound, which was Mountain Dew\u2019s label. Mountain Dew is awful stuff.\u00a0Or Spoon\u2019s music, selling Jaguars. I guess part of it is pragmatic: \u201cWell, we\u2019re not selling records so we have to get our music heard, and to get some money to make more music, we have to license this song for a car commercial.\u201d I\u2019d really like to see the economics of that because it seems like a lot of indie bands do quite well on the road selling concert tickets. I wonder how much they really need the money. Back in the day, in \u201991 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, <\/em>which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, \u201cWe\u2019ll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.\u201d Which was their way of saying no.<\/p>\n

Well, did you ask your editor at least?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I did mention their second offer to my editor, which was that they\u2019d do an interview if that issue would not have any cigarette or alcohol advertising. My editor just laughed.<\/p>\n

What inspired these bands to dovetail music-making with the resolution to live responsibly?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I think for a band like Fugazi, Washington, D.C. is a government town, and\u2014believe it or not\u2014a lot of people in public service, particularly the ones who are not elected, truly are good people who want to serve their fellow human beings. And the good people in Fugazi were the product of that culture. So I think there is a little bit of a regional, cultural element at work, though obviously that\u2019s not to say that Washington, D.C. consistently places a premium on ethical behavior. But the only way the eighties indie community could flourish was if everyone behaved reputably, so ethical conduct became extremely important, almost fetishized. There\u2019s a Bob Dylan line that goes, \u201cTo live outside the law, you must be honest.\u201d It was kind of like that.<\/p>\n

And is that something that\u2019s missing now, ethical behavior in bands?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Certainly the concept of selling out has been dramatically relaxed. But I\u2019d continue with the outlaw analogy\u2014the early years of indie were like the Wild West, with a similar potential for lawlessness. Nowadays pretty much everything has been formalized and there\u2019s less room for sleaze. That ethical impulse has shifted from internal policing to more external concerns, like doing benefit shows and recordings, or running tour vans on cooking oil, supporting political candidates, stuff like that.<\/p>\n

For this Sunday\u2019s show, how did you determine which bands would cover which songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I could tell which bands had been influenced by bands in the book; Wye Oak are clearly Dinosaur Jr. fans, Patrick from Titus Andronicus has obviously sung along to a Replacements song or two. Dirty Projectors playing Black Flag was a no brainer, since they reinterpreted Black Flag\u2019s first album, Damaged<\/em>, on their album Rise Above<\/em>. Steve Marion from Delicate Steve once told me about how they often listen to the Minutemen\u2019s classic Double Nickels on the Dime<\/em> in their tour van, so that was an easy call. Some of the other pairings were more surprising: Big Black will be played by St. Vincent. I\u2019d sent her a list of bands that were still up for grabs, and she replied that she wanted to do Big Black, which just had everyone cackling at how brilliant that is. Big Black\u2019s Steve Albini was kind of an apoplectic nerd whose music more than flirted with misogyny. So to have an incredibly elegant, whip-smart woman singing his music\u2014it\u2019s genius.<\/p>\n

I love all the bands on the bill. And most of them have mentioned, in print, being influenced by the book. I had a Google alert set so that I found out when it was cited online\u2014which is partly how I knew to invite the bands that I did. Merrill Garbus, of tUnE-YaRdS, had actually stopped making music at one point because she was so discouraged, when someone said, \u201cYou should read this book.\u201d So she read Our Band Could Be Your Life <\/em>and was inspired to start up again.<\/p>\n

You know, I didn\u2019t anticipate the book inspiring anybody. I just thought it would be interesting to read, or fun. But for ten years it\u2019s been really rare that I go out to a show without someone walking up to me and saying something about Our Band Could Be Your Life<\/em>. I can\u2019t put into words how fantastic that is. Or one of the most moving things people tell me is that my other book, Come As You Are<\/em>\u2014the book I wrote about Nirvana\u2014was the first book they\u2019d ever read cover to cover. It turned them on to reading books<\/em>. I\u2019d never expected that response. When people tell me that, I always say, \u201cGreat, now read something good<\/em>\u2014like Proust!\u201d<\/p>\n

Dawn Chan writes about music for The Daily and is the assistant editor of Artforum.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published in 2001, Michael Azerrad\u2019s Our Band Could Be Your Life featured the story of thirteen seminal indie bands from 1981\u20131991. Since then, his accounts of the decade\u2019s underground do-it-yourself punk ethos has inspired a generation of music geeks, connoisseurs, and professionals\u2014many of whom have gone on to found or play in various contemporary indie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[2317,2314,2315,2313,2311,46,2312,2316],"class_list":["post-15894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-animal-collective","tag-fugazi","tag-ian-mackaye","tag-indie","tag-michael-azerrad","tag-music","tag-our-band-could-be-your-life","tag-the-dirty-projectors"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Azerrad on \u2018Our Band Could Be Your Life\u2019 by Dawn Chan<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 19, 2011 \u2013 Published in 2001, Michael Azerrad\u2019s Our Band Could Be Your Life featured the story of thirteen seminal indie bands from 1981\u20131991. 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