Abstract

Expressway to Yr Skull

The article focuses on the book "Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991," by Michael Azerrad. Azerrad's exhaustively researched book is a portrait of the world before Nirvana, a vanished age when "Indie" referred to music, not film. Profiling thirteen bands, he adapts the techniques of celebrity biography to his sometimes-celebrated subjects: Minneapolis's shambling and drunken Replacements and Washington's puritanical Minor Threat; Chicago's thudding Big Black and Amherst's folk-influenced Dinosaur, among others. As critics have noted, Azerrad does not tell the only possible story about underground music in the 1980s. All his groups were influenced by punk, dominated by men and attuned to the more abrasive sounds of the electric guitar.