Our Band Could Be Your Life

Thirteen bands from the American underground music scene of the 1980s — Black Flag, the Minutemen, Fugazi, Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, The Replacements, and eight others — each operating completely outside the mainstream music industry, building their own labels, their own distribution networks, their own touring circuits, their own audiences from scratch. Azerrad conducted primary source interviews with everyone involved and produced the most complete document of DIY culture as a political practice ever written. The argument running through all thirteen chapters is the same: that independence from existing systems of production and distribution is not a compromise forced by commercial failure but a deliberate political choice, and that the music made inside that choice sounds different because it is different — accountable only to the people making it and the people listening. Ian MacKaye of Fugazi is the most complete real-world expression of the DoCR philosophy that exists anywhere: no corporate money, no compromise, no apology, no explanation required. The essential companion to Please Kill Me and England's Dreaming — those books document punk's origins, this one documents what the survivors built from the wreckage.