It’s easy to get romantic and nostalgic about independent music, at the same time getting tangled up in messy arguments about authenticity and integrity.  Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 avoids this problem and instead maps out the formation of the American independent music scene with a clear perspective and an evident fondness for the music and the energy such a scene provided.

Azerrad, an American music journalist, sets out to tell the origin stories of thirteen bands that played an important role in the formation and success of the American independent underground scene: Black Flag, The Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr, Fugazi, Mudhoney and Beat Happening. These stories end either when bands break up or, the real death knell, sign to a major label.

They were replaced by a bunch of toughs coming in from outlying suburbs who were only beginning to discover punk’s speed, power and aggression. They didn’t care that punk rock was already being dismissed as a spent force, kid bands playing at being the Ramones a few years too late. Dispensing with all pretension, these kids boled the music down to its essence, then revved up the tempos to the speed of a pencil impatiently tapping on a school desk, and called the result “hardcore.”

What struck me about these stories is how key figures featured across many of the stories, creating the sense that in particular geographical regions and across the nation this really was a scene. An organic, thriving, cultural scene that managed to shape the sound of “alternative” music. This isn’t indie as a sound (you know, those guitar based bands on major labels that are relentlessly described as indie) or an aesthetic, but independent as prerogative. These bands were indie because there was no other option or outlet for the sounds they wanted to make.

I’m a punk/hardcore nerd, so the most interesting chapters for me were those related to Black Flag, Minor Threat, Big Black and Fugazi. However, even the chapters on bands who I’d never really connected with before (Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth), managed to keep my interest. These are not always the stories of righteously independent minded individuals, the bands histories are marked by petty in-fighting, drugs, alcohol, strained relationships, the usual “creative differences” – there is a wealth of great melodrama here that Azerrad is not afraid to explore. A little more about gender inequality would have been interesting as only a handful of women feature in these bands, but I’m sure this topic has been covered in depth elsewhere. As a history of the time, the music, and establishing why and how these bands were so important to a form we take for granted now, Our Band Could Be Your Life is engaging, and dare I say it, even a little inspiring.

Minor Threat epitomized one of hardcore’s major strengths: It was underground music by, for, and about independent minded kids. These kids weren’t on the hipster-bohemian wavelength, either because they weren’t hip or bohemian or because they simply felt the whole trip was needlessly exclusive and elitist. So it figures that hardcore would become popular in a definitively uncool city like Washington D.C. Hardcore wasn’t some druggy pose copped from Rimbaud, it was about things its audience encountered every day, and it certainly wasn’t some lowest common denominator corporate marketing ploy; hardcore kids knew the consequences of the former and grasped the larger implications of participating in the latter. And it had a beat they could dance to.

Our Band Could Be Your Life has me thinking about the possibility or viability of a contemporary underground/independent culture. Much is made in the book of how the lack of communication technology beyond the telephone meant that much of the networking was done through old-school means, namely mail, telephone and zines. With the current saturation of internet technologies aiding communication and social networking, doesn’t that also offer ready-made niche audiences to sounds and ideas that would previously have to either wait for audiences to adapt to new sounds or actively seek out those who would “get it”? Then again, much of the creation of these audiences is due, in part, to the efforts of the bands mentioned here.