100 books like Our Band Could Be Your Life

If Andrew Hunt’s book covers swaths of American popular culture to reveal levels of public dissent, Martin’s book takes a similar approach, but with a particular focus on grassroots activism. Across the U.S., activism took many forms. The Nuclear Freeze campaign, with its simple call to halt the arms race, inspired (in June 1982) the largest public protest in American history. Others rebelled against Reagan’s painfully slow response to even recognize the AIDS epidemic, while on college campuses students rallied against Reagan’s policies towards apartheid-era South Africa. Martin’s examination of how various strands of feminism reacted to the conservative backlash of the Reagan Era is an especially welcome addition to the decade’s historiography.

From Martin’s expansive look at things, let’s move onto a more granular approach – Fournier’s Double Nickels. Fournier focuses on just one band and an album (albeit a double record album and one of the best to come out of punk in the 1980s). The Minutemen played a fast, discordant music that sounded like jazz as much as hardcore thrash music. Fournier’s examination turns up something few people consider, that punk wasn’t all about blistering music but rather sophisticated in its nature. Fournier documents how the bassist in the band, Mike Watt, had extended conversations with one of the most important artists associated with 1980s punk – Raymond Pettibon (who as of now has made his way into accomplished art museums and galleries). They talked about everything from Ludwig Wittgenstein to James Joyce. Band members supposedly got into heated debates about history and would stop at public libraries while… show more.

Albeit about Britain more than America, the authors collected together here show how easy it was for young punks to move from just listening to music to political engagement. Most of it being direct action: squatting abandoned buildings or civil disobedience against the nuclear arms race. The most accomplished band here was Crass who had an immense impact in the United States and who drew from different sources, including, I quote, “Ghandian principles, radical philosophy, the aesthetic of the Beat and Bohemian poets, and the words of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, as much as… the formal anarchist tradition.” It’s unfair that many believe punk just to be nihilistic and violent – and the authors here show why (it should be pointed out that Worley has his own book on this, which is also quite good: No Future)

Known mostly as the bassist for the noise band, Sonic Youth, Gordon was also a sophisticated critic and supporter of the growing punk movement in America during the 1980s. In this collection of essays (many of them originally published in art magazines), she explains one of the most distinct movements within 1980s punk – “straight edge,” refusing drugs and alcohol, thereby disassociating the classic mantra of sex, drugs, and rock n roll. With a sharp eye, she explains, “These kids are antidrugs, antidrinking, anti-Reagan, and antisex – not so much out of puritanism as from a desire to be in control, and to avoid being manipulated by the consumerist system.” She praises the Do it Yourself (DIY) spirit of 1980s punk, enjoying watching bands “jam econo” (that’s a Minutemen term). She also holds this sort of activity in contrast with the blasé spirit she gets from observing new wave nightclubs… show more.

The birth of punk rock was never really about the music – or at least not just about the music – and England’s Dreaming sets the context for probably the most volatile genre to assault the senses. Jon Savage’s book explores the historical and social setting that led to this – albeit brief – explosion in youth culture. He links together the birth of anarchism with the Situationist art movement alongside the eventual do-it-yourself attitude of punk fashion and music to create a narrative that’s both fascinating and incredibly relevant to the world today. As the legendary contemporaneous fanzine, Sniffing Glue once put it: Here’s a guitar chord, here’s another, here’s another…now go form a band!

This book became a bible for me as a young person deciding what my future would look like, and I never forgot, as a suburban high school student, how magical New York felt on the page and how much I wanted to be there with this cast of characters.

The New York that lives on these pages, all guts and grunge and glitter, is the New York I see in my dreams and was delighted to cite in my book as well. 

Tells the story of the further development of punk in Washington DC, and the birth of a thousand subgenres, from emo to post-hardcore and beyond, and punk's embracing of a more aware political consciousness, as well as a broader musical spectrum.

This book has been my bible for most of my adult life - reading it as a teenager changed everything. Rollins' diaries from the gruelling years of grunt level touring with arguably the most important punk band of them all (Black Flag), it has to be read to be believed, and will make you grateful for everything you have in life, whilst also tweaking your hunger for the road.

Before getting to radio, alternative scenes came together in the 1970s and 1980s through informal networks of shared tapes, backyard concerts, and zines. These scenes had politics all to themselves, which revolved around concepts of “authenticity.”

Duncombe’s book not only captures the range and meaning of zines in all their forms, but it unravels the deeper meaning of these DIY publications. As he writes, “Zinesters believe that authenticity can be found only in a person unshackled by the contrivances of society.” Zines thus offered the purest expressions of self, in theory, but soon, the zine scene developed its own codes of conduct and traditions – practices though that would inform the sound and practice of college radio.

What I love about this book is that it delves into theory (zinesters were like Rousseau? Who knew?!) but remains accessible, using the theory only to enlighten underappreciated aspects of zine culture.

Alice Echols is not only a renowned historian of the post–World War II era, exploring gender, politics, and pop culture, but she is also a former club DJ herself. She brings those experiences to her resurrection of the much-reviled disco scenes of the 1970s, which, before they became corporate big business, were the site of contests over the voices of American culture.

But more than that, Echols reveals how disco was an underground phenomenon, one whose origins are somehow more hidden than punk’s, and connects transnationally across oceans and across U.S. communities that reveal a complicated map of U.S. culture that defies common tropes.

More than a chronicle of disco’s rise and fall, Hot Stuff instead explores “shifts in identity and representation and the debates they triggered,” as well as reveals the dynamics between underground and commercial that would roil college radio. On top of it all, Echols’s engaging writing… show more.