Rock and Roll and the Apolitical '80s: A Response to Michael Azerrad’s Book, Our Band Could Be Your Life

I made an American squirm, and it felt so right. - Nick Lowe

Inside the front jacket cover to Michael Azerrad’s new book Our Band Could Be Your Life lies what at first seems like a relatively benign boast: “It was a musical revolution that happened under the nose of the Reagan Eighties” it reads. It is the sort of hype-worthy statement that, aside from its amusing implication, is, at the least, historically accurate considering Azerrad’s self-imposed timeline framed by the book’s subtitle: “Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991”. As dust jacket fodder goes, the assertion serves the book well by aiming right for the heart of its likely anticipated demographic, but in reality it is just crude mythology that projects a sense of politics onto the music of the times that wasn’t necessarily emanating from the artists themselves.

And although the conjured images of an oblivious President Reagan aimlessly wandering the halls of the White House while an esoteric underground culture secretly countered his every move - his “Morning in America” vision - are tempting as tragic comedy, they’re ultimately just steps in a fool’s parade, a grudge fueled protest march that chooses to ignore too many of the deepest, darkest realities of American life that fed the 1980’s indie rock movement.

“Sometimes I don’t thrill you / sometimes I think I’ll kill you / but just don’t let me fuck up will you? / because when I need a friend it's still you” - “Freak Scene”, Dinosaur Jr.

Ronald Reagan could hardly be to blame for a nearly perfect line like that. But listening to the new Dinosaur Jr. “best of” (a Rhino affair, coyly titled Ear Bleeding Country), as archetypal an 80's indie rock band as you'll find, it’s tough to hear even a trace of the politics that Azzerad occasionally implies in his book. In fact, it’s hard to find any direct political intent in most of the brilliant music that left a littered trail across America’s underground throughout the 1980’s - it just isn’t there.

Yet, despite the apparent spectacular urge, or even need, for many pop culture historians to connect the former President to the strident malaise and disenchantment that permeated the 1980’s post punk American indie rock scene, the debatably oblivious Reagan was, in reality, a non-issue. He may have been the President, but what was really being countered culturally during the astonishing and extraordinarily creative period between 1981 and 1991 was something far greater than the ethereal simplicity of political leadership.

These were the voices of a seemingly forgotten generation caught between; one that saw an old industrial American economy give way to a high-tech digital American economy, only to find that theirs was an era arriving too late for the factory whistle, blue-collar industrial jobs, and too early to catch the high technology bus to a better future. American indie rock’s golden era was, in the end, just the noises of a generation that witnessed the death of their shot at the American Dream.

That is not to say that Reagan didn’t inform any of the era’s essentially negating music. Clearly he was the target of many artists’ ire and spite, and he was an enormously inspiring one at that. As veteran rock writer Greil Marcus so aptly pointed out at the time and in his prologue to his book Ranters and Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music 1977-1992 (now in print under the humorous moniker In the Fascist Bathroom) the early 80’s housed extraordinary works by established “punks” (using that terms appropriately loose sensibility) like Elvis Costello’s “Pills and Soap” and King of America, and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, which Marcus rightfully dubbed “three of the quietest punk records ever made, and three of the truest.”

But Springsteen and Costello were older men, elders of sorts, who were of the ages that many are when they sincerely struggle with finally carving out and firming up their own socio-political visions from the clays of their life experience. The two of them, no matter their wider import, and no matter their politics (and never having typified conventional “punk”), along with Ronald Reagan, meant little or nothing to the swarm of kids who were busy planting the seeds of a new American rock moment. Those were the old guys, all of them, and they, collectively, were a part of the problem. Indie rock in the early 1980’s didn’t differentiate between who was an acceptable part of the establishment or who was not - the entire establishment was a sham! And when you are eighteen years old with nowhere to go, no jobs to be found, and see nearly no prospects for a future, the specifics of the world - i.e. who the President of the United States of America is - just do not matter. After losing faith in something that once seemed a guarantee, you reach a point when you realize that maybe it’s high time to forget about the old American Dream and to set out on your own. Maybe it’s time to create a parallel vision of the American possibility.

So while Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, and other established artists were busy tugging at the frayed edges of “the Big Curtain”, hoping to expose what they suspected were the scurrilous little Wizard’s who were cowering behind its plush sanctity, a dynamic and youthful underground was mushrooming up from within the worlds corporate order and sprouting from the twin rotting roots of punk rock and American society at large. This cultural fungus would grow wild and spread out to become one of the more diverse and fertile fields in rock and roll’s short urgent history - one that found its voice in the broken lives, families, and promises of American life - not in the jingoistic politics of a old mediocre B movie actor.

Unfortunately Azerrad sees and hears things a bit differently. Throughout Our Band he sporadically returns to the misguided Reagan/indie rock connection as though it were a pervasive tenet of this undeniably fertile period in American music. And although it is far from being the theme of his book, Azzerad returns to this premise enough that it becomes maddeningly silly at times. Writing of the Replacements legendary drinking habits, Azzerad somehow leaps to the conclusion that “Against the backdrop of straight edge and the new Puritanism being advocated by the Reagan regime, getting wasted was once again a rebellious act.” As though the decades of teen-to-collegiate age alcohol abuse ebbed and flowed like waves on a political ocean, dependent upon, and wholly indicative of, which political party held power.

While bands like the Minutemen and Fugazi did have a distinct political sensibility a young Ian MacKaye, while in Minor Threat, at one point confesses, “I fuckin’ hated Reagan. I’ve always hated the government.” But then MacKaye then adds, “I guess what I felt like was it (politics) wasn’t my domain. I didn’t really know enough about the world to sing about it. But I knew enough about my world to sing about it.”

MacKaye’s statement cuts right to the heart of the indie rock movement. Eighteen, nineteen, and twenty year old kids usually don’t give a shit about wider political landscapes. A President, particularly one who, like Reagan, was barely even elected or inaugurated at the time that most of the bands who inaugurated the indie movement were concieved, doesn’t mean jack-shit to a dirtbag outcast of a kid from the bad part of town, or even, as the indie movement so eloquently proved, one who hails from a certain kind of boring, rotten suburban life and is scraping for his or her way the fuck out.

“I think most of us were reacting to rock and roll itself,” says John Petkovic, founder of the 80’s glam creep rock group Death of Samantha and now of Cobre Verde, when asked to place the era in context. “I mean most of us were just sick of having to hear Bryan Adams. We could care less about Reagan. We wanted to make rock and roll that we liked and you couldn’t do that within the system that existed. So you try and create your own system. For most of the bands I knew, it wasn’t really political at all, other than the fact that the established rock industry sucked.”

So it was that most of the artists who shaped the brilliant core of indie rock were of an age where they’d grown up with an endless cycle of national shame, scandal, and disillusionment: Nixon’s Watergate, Ford’s pardon, Carter’s Inflation and energy crunch, and the rise of once the self-righteous baby-boomer’s greed mongering (interestingly enough it was the Boomer generation that centered the real decade of greed, the Clinton 90’s, when, unlike the commonly and somewhat rightfully derided Reagan Eighties, everyone got into the act and played the Dow and NASDAQ like a giant slot machine looking for their BIG personal score), and the luminous art that fueled this indie rock in the 1980’s was never a specific reaction to Ronald Reagan or George Bush, nor was it in specific response to Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, or any other single politico of the times; rather it was the guttural howl of a bunch of nothing-to-lose kids who grew up during highly uncertain times under a fucked-up system that became utterly stifling and deathly monotonous.

Thus this sprouting, throughout the decade of the 80’s, of a vibrant underground network of bands, fanzines, clubs, and record labels served up a parallel culture, one that ignored the mainstream, which couldn’t be bought into, and spread its roots across the country - from New Haven, Connecticut to Seattle, Washington. It was the ultimate do-it-yourself underground with an aesthetic pedigree in punk rock’s ethos and a keen interest in the socially galvanizing and transcendent qualities of rock and roll. Ronald Reagan just happened to be inaugurated President shortly after its onset.

And although he certainly fueled some of the creative fervor at the time, he certainly did not spawn it, nor was he its only seed. This was much larger; this was a seismic reaction - born in the fiery belly of punk rock - to an entire lifetime of learned disgust and mistrust by a generation that was seemingly written off and left to slip between history’s cracks. To leave it as anything less is insulting to those who lived it.

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