Then things got worse. In the latter half of the decade a new wave of lite heavy metal alchemized and hit the charts. Even the best of these groups -- Guns N' Roses, say -- were obviously bozos. They looked absurd, and their music was almost comically derivative. The worst were almost unspeakable. (Remember Sebastian Bach, from the group Skid Row, who appeared on stage with a shirt that said "AIDS: Kills Fags Dead"?)
There is bad popular music in any era. (I'll see your REO Speedwagon and raise you a Def Leppard.) But even as Huey Lewis and the News was selling 9 million copies of "Sports," a roiling group of people across the country were adhering to a slightly more elevated set of rock verities, at least as they saw them. R.E.M., the most high profile and ultimately the most successful of these bands, found it in tunefulness, chiming guitars and relatively straightforward business dealings. Others -- a lot of others -- found it in terrifically high volumes, intermittent personal hygiene, various species of what they imagined was antisocial behavior, and, sometimes, actual sonic experimentation.
This period is chronicled in a new book by Azerrad, "This Band Could Be Your Life," which profiles, fanzine style, 13 of the groups from this period. The bands include Black Flag, the greatest of the violent Los Angeles hardcore bands; Sonic Youth, the intelligent New York art rockers; the Replacements, the tuneful, alcohol-drenched Minneapolis combo; and many others. His choice of subjects is unerring, and he got admirable access to the groups he chose. But I got tired of the book after a few chapters.
While the intro and outro aren't bad, the meat of the book is superficial. It doesn't paper over conflicts or financial problems between the bands and their labels, for example, but there's still a way in which the book accepts at face value the band members' view of themselves. In the Black Flag chapter, Azerrad makes a lot of references to the pressure Greg Ginn, the group's founder and bassist, had running his label, the celebrated SST, but you never got a sense of its finances, or how much Ginn was making versus his band mates. In the end, did Ginn end up with a hefty chunk of cash? How are the other group members doing?
The Black Flag story is a truly amazing tale, full of violence and absurdism; Ginn actually ended up in jail for violating a court injunction in a legal fight with MCA. (Now that is indie.) But Azerrad is also a little credulous, as when he says the Los Angeles Police Department was listening in on the label's phones and stationing undercover officers around its offices. It may be true, but the assertion isn't sourced, and it sure sounds like stoner rocker hyperbole. ("And, man, the police were, were, wiretapping us!") A more enterprising reporter would have sourced the charge, gotten comment from the LAPD, or tried to find out if wiretapping warrants were ever issued or carried out.
Still, the story is an inexorable one: These bands soon began popping up on, and then dominating, critics' end-of-year 10-best lists and building up decent (if uniformly tiny by mainstream standards) tour followings, but couldn't get a break from radio, or, for the most part, MTV. And it wasn't clear, at least at first, if they wanted it. The new indie rock had different concerns, including a distrust of technology, and affinity for a lot of things the corporate masters didn't like: American roots music in some cases, and, most broadly, a commitment to volume, dishabille, contrariness generally, and "authenticity."
Ah, authenticity. It wasn't seriousness, exactly -- irony in a fairly watered-down form existed in the work of the wacky Camper Van Beethoven and, certainly, in the psychedelic ferocity of the Butthole Surfers. But bands were for the most part expected to be honest and feel honestly. They were supposed to care about their true fans -- since the members of the bands, it was assumed, were true fans themselves -- and not be in it for the money, exactly.
The everyman stance wasn't a posture. The band members, with a few prominent exceptions, were lowlifes every bit as foul as the members of the audiences that came to see them, and they suffered -- came from broken homes, were abused, felt like losers and despaired -- in just the same way. Some of these groups had singers who howled in fury, like Black Flag's Henry Rollins or Cobain himself; others were just, well, losers. But the message was the same.
Anyway, as time went on, many of these groups found themselves cluttered in a few small benchmark labels across the country, like Sub Pop in Seattle, Touch and Go in Chicago, SST in Los Angeles, Twin-Tone in Minneapolis, Matador and Homestead in New York and many others not as well known. The idea was that they could forge a community and make music without the benefit of the big bad major labels or the big bad national press. They listened to each other on college-rock stations, slept on couches in a nationwide network of fan houses, saw one another's tiny posters on telephone poles and read about one another in a network of national fanzines.
Next page: The indie conundrum