Fun Stuff > BAND
Our Band Could Be Your Life
Ernest:
Why? Why is it so important to like those books? Or are you being facetious?
Johnny C:
Our Band has merits which have been summed up much more nicely than I could hope to elsewhere in this thread, but it's an important examination of a particular subculture at a particular time in America, chronicling its subsequent branching out into a nearly boundless network of influence across the world. More importantly it's a good read.
Please Kill Me is essential reading for anyone even remotely versed in punk music. It's an oral history, and probably one of the best-organized ones I've ever read. Every single vignette in the book is tailored to convey multiple simultaneous viewpoints of a given event while being incredibly compelling for the reader. It's full of brilliant lines and masterful work on the parts of editors Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. Most importantly, it gives an incredibly robust, personal and entertaining look at a specific cultural movement, its effects on the world and its ramifications for its members as time went on. It's hilarious, heartwrenching, earnest, wry and remarkably human at every turn of the page. It also has Iggy Pop solemnly telling someone that his shit doesn't stink anymore.
I don't know why you'd think I'm being facetious. If these things are even remotely in your interest then you really ought to find them fascinating, and if you don't you need to seriously re-examine what is in your interest.
p.s. when the fuck did i break nine thousand posts
Jackie Blue:
That Our Band Could Be Your Life is well-written is a matter of opinion.
It is possible to respect the subject matter of something while despising the thing itself as being the work of a bad, hack corporate journalist who is co-opting the indie aesthetic in a way which very much goes against the very thing it allegedly stood for.
It's like Sid and Nancy or 24 Hour Party People. While I personally enjoy both both those movies, I could respect someone who disliked them without dismissing them as ignorant.
It's a book, not a collection of quotes from musicians. If it were just a collection of interviews, or interviews and articles that were written at the time, I tihnk it would both be more useful and more realistic.
Instead, it comes across as what it is: Rock journalism. And I cannot stand rock journalism in general, particularly when it comes from someone on the outside looking in.
Ernest:
@Johnny
I thought you were being facetious when you said that if we thought those books sucked then all hope was probably lost for us.
I don't see what being interested in indie or punk and thinking those books were good have to do with each other. Zerodrone read Our Band because he is interested in the subject matter but he doesn't think the book was well-written. I say that's fair. I liked the book, but it certainly didn't live up to my expectations. But then again, what could? There are a million different takes on what Azerrad was talking about. Ian Mackaye said that he doesn't want to read the written histories of the punk and indie scenes and movements he was a part of because the authors will inevitably be wrong about certain things.
I did find the book fascinating. I found the members of Dinosaur Jr's relationships with each other to be fascinating and I found the antics of the Gibby Haynes to be fascinating (if execrable). I still don't think the section about the Butthole Surfers had any place in the book.
Jackie Blue:
Technically the Violent Femmes were on Slash, which the author includes in the introduction as being an "independant label" despite it being distributed by a major. It's especially hilarious that within a few pages of saying Slash was independant, he says he "couldn't" cover REM because of IRS having an obscure thrice-removed connection with a major label. He can't have it both ways; if Slash was an indie label, then so was IRS. I mean, Guns 'n Roses were on Slash, for crying out loud.
As to The Violent Femmes producing one good album, I think you're absolutely insane and need to go listen to them some more. They were consistently good well into the mid-90s and their live performances are the stuff of legend.
But don't take my word for it. I think this is more punk than half of what was pushed with that label:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHapDS2fcFE
And even if the Violent Femmes did only make one "great" album - that's one more than Black Flag did. Black Flag never rose above the level of "decent" in my opinion, certainly nowhere close to the quality of the Minutemen or Mission of Burma.
EDIT: Pasted the wrong live clip.
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