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Fun to Lose

Review: Jon Fine, ‘Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear)’

Kurt Cobain Nirvana
Kurt Cobain / AP
October 4, 2015

At the peak of its underground prestige, Sub Pop Records was known to wave off the innumerable demo submissions that didn’t interest them with a form letter that opened with "Dear Loser." It was less a gesture of hipster mean-spiritedness than brand consistency. In its late-1980s infancy, Sub Pop had found the tone that most appealed to and came to define a generation, that of self-deprecation and detachment, but also of self-identified social and economic ostracism. It printed a t-shirt that simply read "LOSER," worn by its most popular bands (and Eddie Vedder), who played the label’s first "Lamefest" in 1989. It didn’t seem to matter that Sub Pop’s own motto was "World Domination," and that its business model was borrowed from pop factories like Motown, or that the business itself was near bankruptcy. Or, to add yet another level or irony, that it was set back on course by a deal with Geffen Records, at once shrewd and Faustian, to receive royalty payments for Nirvana’s Nevermind. An identity had been formed and with it a cribbed history.

Indie rock history, like all pop music history, thrives on legend. Or rather, it is centered on one legend, in which, following more than a decade of struggle, Nirvana galloped into the American consciousness like a rock ‘n’ roll Cromwell leading Seattle Roundheads, thwarting the hair metal Cavaliers, and beheading, so to speak, the King of Pop himself, and thereby changing the culture and bettering the world long after their abrupt demise. 1991 was "the year that punk broke." The losers were, in fact, the winners, even if they were still invariably, authentically losers. All that came before it was a mere prologue in the face of this glorious revolution, or whatever. And even if "indie rock" is subject to ever increasing socio-critical scrutiny in its current form, the lunatics taking the asylum narrative inspires reverence from musicians, journalists, publicists, and A&R reps, regardless of motive or talent, and makes compelling copy in the never-ending stream of books and documentaries of that period and the Great Bands who came to represent it.

From the title alone it is clear that Your Band Sucks, Jon Fine’s memoir about his time as a musician in the indie rock heyday, is written fluently in the detached language of that world. Yet right at the outset, Fine makes clear that he has something different in mind. If you can’t figure out who Jon Fine is and why he wrote this book without the aid of Google, Fine himself would not be surprised. "Books like this generally tell stories by or about luminaries," he writes in the forward. "This book isn’t that."

Fine is currently best known as a journalist and executive editor for Inc. magazine, as well as for being the husband of MediaBistro’s founder, Laurel Touby. None of this would seem conceivable to the version of himself he is writing about in Your Band Sucks. The book covers nearly three decades of his life, much of them spent putting off adulthood "for as long as possible" through rock music. Fine’s helpful annotated "bandography" at the beginning of the second section shows that he’s played in seven bands between 1986 and 2006.

His first real and most successful band, Bitch Magnet began when he, the bassist and vocalist Sooyoung Park, and the drummer Orestes Morfín were undergraduates at Oberlin. "The common thread running through our backgrounds," Fine writes, "was otherness and loneliness." Diverse though the band was, its roots were typical of the emerging pre-Nevermind underground: playing fast, abrasive hardcore before stretching their sound into angular, but no less abrasive territory. Theirs was the sort of introverted expressionist punk of Slint and Codeine as opposed to the more eccentric power pop of The Pixies or Dinosaur Jr. (If that doesn’t help, Fine sardonically reminds us that the music is "on Spotify and Pandora and iTunes and Amazon and YouTube.")

"Being in a band," Fine writes, "entered you into a conspiracy against the rest of the world." More than a band, Bitch Magnet was "a gang," like The Replacements, even if, in one of his many cold water asides, "it wasn’t until much later that I … learned that The Replacements weren’t best friends. Not even close."

Still, in the four years they existed they released three records to critical acclaim, toured the United States and Europe, and even got (after hours) airplay on MTV. Yet in its lifetime, Bitch Magnet was never popular, often being recognized solely for its name, and Fine’s subsequent bands, he recalls equally candid disappointment and self-awareness, fared worse. In addition to a standard memoir, Your Band Sucks often veers off into screed and revisionist history. Fine’s indie rock is less a movement waiting for validation and more a gathering of awkward individuals struggling to express themselves without compromise. It was an entirely analog existence. Fliers and records were made and distributed by hand. Tours were booked by phone and payment for those tours were miniscule if they could get payment. It was a time short on resources, but long on passion. Fine recalls his ‘80s infused with the missionary zeal typical of young punks:

I liked playing music that came from the head, guts, and crotch. Anything else was pointless. If you weren’t going for power—or just to be really weird, or to do something that hadn’t already been done a thousand times, or something big—I didn’t understand why …

That zeal, however, becomes less intense as the ’80s progress into the ’90s. Fine is kicked out of Bitch Magnet, invited back, and endures a miserable European tour before the band breaks up under personal and financial fatigue. Fine’s ‘90s were not the golden age of indie pop most remember. Punk breaks and then gets broken in a major label feeding frenzy. Bands that would never have been signed before Nevermind get signed, and then get dropped; others flame out, while mediocre ones—he singles out Smashing Pumpkins—thrive, inviting their betters on thankless opening spots on tours. In the underground, the "cerebral" punk of Bitch Magnet gives way to the precious "cuddle party" rock of Beat Happening. The failure of his second group, Vineland, after draining tours and a twice-recorded but unreleased album, was the end for him:

[T]here were people brave enough, and strong enough, to place all their bets on music, no matter what happened, and I was no longer one of them.

By 2000, Fine is 32, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sans a band and a job. It would be another decade before Bitch Magnet would revive, with record rereleases and a short, bittersweet reunion tour.

Though Your Band Sucks has a basic, three-part structure, centered roughly on Bitch Magnet, post-Bitch Magnet, and renaissance Bitch Magnet, the book is written in a conversational, sometimes essayistic manner. Fine’s tones veer wildly. He rages, he preaches, he despairs, and he celebrates. He swears copiously and the ironic, self-aware humor implied by the title is backed up in the text. "If you, too, perceive something uniquely heartbreaking about the phrase ‘appeared on one Australian compilation and one Spanish compilation,’ well, imagine applying it to your own band." He opines freely, perhaps too freely for some, on any number of indie idols. Black Flag and Mission of Burma come in for repeat praise, he bemoans Paul Westerberg’s "sappiness," he remembers his "heart sinking when the Pixies started getting big," and Black Dice was "so abstract as to approximate musique concrète." Fine also includes interjections from his peers, including Juan MacLean of Six Finger Satellite and James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem.

But for all the relevance punk rock had in his life, and continues to have, the sentiment in his book’s title is a sober one. The "revolution" of indie rock fell short of expectations:

Almost nothing I’d hoped for twenty-five years ago had happened. The weirdos hadn’t taken over. Our bands hadn’t changed the world, or destroyed big, bad major labels. (That was the Internet’s job.) Or even changed the mainstream much.

Revolution, properly so called, upends conventional conceptions and renders longstanding models of being and doing unworkable. Indie rock’s revolution was simply an appropriation. The Internet sucked up indie’s ethos. It killed off dad rock and razed the structures of the recording industry, both independent and major. Fine is happy enough with this:

I wanted to play, and hear, music that was physically involving. I wanted the sound to physically affect the audience. I wanted it loud enough to feel it. Some people want a song to speak to them. I wanted to disappear into the sound. I know. I know I’m supposed to say that you can’t crescendo at 125 decibels all the time, and there’s supposed to be that blend of light and shade as Jimmy Page wanted for Led Zepplin. But screw that. Because some of my favorite records, like Minor Threat’s first 7"s or Slayer’s Reign in Blood or Prong’s Primitive Origins, do nothing but amp up every moment to the absolute max.

Algorithms can’t do that just yet. Your Band Sucks is a memoir that has nothing to prove. Or rather, almost nothing.

Published under: Book reviews