Our Band Could Be Your Life

I'll start this off by saying that I'm probably one of the least punk rock people in existence, and I wouldn't have picked this up if 1) it hadn't been a Kindle Daily Deal and 2) my friend Caroline hadn't been so enthusiastic about it. But I'm super glad I did! I learned a LOT.

I had honestly never heard of most of these bands? And even the ones I had... I mean, literally the first time I ever heard of Henry Rollins was when he was a guest judge on RuPaul's Drag Race. And now I'm like, wow, it is pretty crazy that that guy was on RuPaul's Drag Race. Anyway, so, it's not really the kind of music I tend to listen to, and pretty much every time Azerrad described some important concert I was just like, “Gross, that sounds terrible.” Like not just from the spitting and other bodily fluids, but just pretty much every time he talked about a particular band trying to figure out how to be louder or more distorted or whatever, I was just like, nope, turn up the Taylor Swift please. (Like, seriously, I get mad when somebody spills beer on me at a show. If the lead singer of a band threw a bottle of piss on the audience of a show I was at, I would NEVER LEAVE MY HOUSE AGAIN.)

I've also been trying to listen to some of these bands on YouTube and Spotify, because even though the way Azerrad describes the music sounds terrible to me, he's also clearly passionate about it and so were a lot of people? But mostly I'm just like... nope, still turn up the Taylor Swift.

ANYWAY so all that said... it's a really impressive feat of narrative nonfiction to make me read hundreds of pages about this stuff, and to make me enjoy it. Well played, Michael Azerrad. I also am really on board with his general thesis about what an important time this was, and a lot of the themes he talks about I definitely see resonate in things I care about more, like riot grrl (which gets like, 3 pages toward the end). Like I'm super interested in the process/movements described here, if not the music itself, so much??

Oh and I liked his epilogue about how the internet is the new Seattle. I'd read a whole book about that. Has Michael Azerrad written a book about the internet?? Let me just check... ah, no. Well, I'd read it, if he did. (I would also read if it he wrote a book about Taylor Swift, for the record.)