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Our Band Could Be Your Life

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ScrambledGregs:
This thread is essentially "bait indie rock fans into getting angry and have yet another pointless argument about music" so I'm just going to say the following and walk away: if you can look me in the eye and say that Sonic Youth are neither a good band nor important to popular music, you're either a liar or an idiot.

Joseph:
Gregs, I am utterly baffled as to where you are getting the impression that what you put above is the subject of the thread.

David_Dovey:
I listen to a lot of bands that I otherwise wouldn't have known about and enjoyed if it wasn't for this book. For that it deserves at least some kudos.

EDIT: OK so that's really got nothing to do with the actual topic but goddamn Mission of Burma and The Minutemen are fuckin rawk

Jackie Blue:

--- Quote from: ScrambledGregs on 14 Dec 2007, 19:12 ---This thread is essentially "bait indie rock fans into getting angry and have yet another pointless argument about music" so I'm just going to say the following and walk away: if you can look me in the eye and say that Sonic Youth are neither a good band nor important to popular music, you're either a liar or an idiot.

--- End quote ---

No, that's not what this thread is because I am as much as an "indie rock fan" as you or anyone else on this forum, and probably moreso than many, and I honestly have never heard anyone that isn't under 25 AND on a music forum say anything positive about this book at all.  Seriously.  And I know a lot of people who listen to every band in the book.  And I don't know what the damn you're talking about with the Sonic Youth thing, I didn't say anything about the bands the book talks about, just the book itself.

Anyway, I'll say again that the scope of the book is just too narrow.  I was buying SST albums in the 80s, and I distinctly remember there being a lot more going on than the types of music this book talks about.

The selections are pretty dubious, too.  Black Flag?  Really?  He should have just called that chapter "Greg Ginn" or "SST" because as a band, I'd say that X was slightly more infuential.  His po-faced quoting of Black Flag's laughably asinine lyrics doesn't help his case, either.

And seriously, Beat Happening?  Beat fucking Happening?  Tacking them on to the end of the book as some kind of concession that "Hey, this book isn't JUST about pre-grunge music and boys.  Really."

The glaring lack of The Violent Femmes is also pretty insane.  Yes, I know, "You can't put everyone in the book" but The Violent Femmes were more influential and important than Beat Happening or the Butthole Surfers or Mudhoney (and I'm an huge Butthole Surfers fan).

Anyway, it's really all about the fact that dude is a bad writer and a bad journalist.  It doesn't help that he completel sugar-coats the Greg Ginn/SST thing, either, because Greg Ginn is notoriously a complete asshole who very often didn't pay the bands what they were owed and sometimes completely fucked bands over to the point of bankruptcy (Negativland?  Hello?)  In fact, this is the only bio-book I've read that mentions him and doesn't have a lot of quotes from band members about how much they hate him - particularly odd in the cases of Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers, since there are whole chapters about them and coincidentally doesn't have any of them quoted as saying anything against Ginn, when Gibby Haynes and Lee Ranaldo have been two of the most outspoken anti-Ginn and anti-SST people of all.

a pack of wolves:
Actually, Our Band Could Be Your Life is where I found out that SST would very often not pay bands and that Sonic Youth moved to a major in large part because of its failures. He doesn't gloss over it to anything near the degree you're suggesting. He admittedly doesn't attack Ginn for it himself but I'm not sure how productive that would be in any case. These things are definitely in there though.

I disagree about X being slightly more influential too. I suppose it depends on what you're interested in to some extent and as someone who likes hardcore and DIY music in general Black Flag are a far bigger deal, and the same goes for Beat Happening. Their approach to music was as significant for the DIY aesthetic as Dischord's so I regard them as a hugely influential band. I don't think you've given very compelling reasons why either of these bands should be left out, and I also just don't see how anything with a broader scope could avoid being either very shallow or just a plain disorganised mess.

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