Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991

Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life is structured a collection of mini-profiles of thirteen seminal indie rock bands from 1981-1991 — or roughly the period between Talking Heads and Nevermind. The profiled bands include: Black Flag, Minutemen, Mission of Burma, Minor Threat, Husker Du, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Dinosaur Jr., Fugazi, Mudhoney, and Beat Happening. Azerrad's musical analysis is too high-level and hagiographic, and he seems too eager to use the bands' material impoverishment as proof of their artistic talent, but the back stories on each are almost uniformly excellent.