Jon Fine spent nearly thirty years performing and recording with bands that played various forms of aggressive and challenging underground rock music, and, as he writes in this memoir, at no point were any of those bands "ever threatened, even distantly, by actual fame." Yet when members of his first band, Bitch Magnet, reunited after twenty-one years to tour Europe, Asia, and America, diehard longtime fans traveled from far and wide to attend those shows, which was a testament to the remarkable staying power of the indie culture that the bands predating the likes of Bitch Magnet willed into existence through sheer determination and a shared disdain for the mediocrity of contemporary popular music.
Like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, Your Band Sucks is an insider's look at a fascinating and ferociously loved subculture. In it, Fine tracks how the indie-rock underground emerged and evolved, how it grappled with the mainstream and vice versa, and how it led many bands to an odd rebirth in the twenty-first century, in which they reunited, briefly and bittersweetly, after being broken up for decades. With backstage access to many key characters in the scene—and plenty of wit and sharply worded opinion—Fine delivers a memoir that affectionately yet critically portrays an important, heady moment in music history.
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“The short shelf of great books on indie rock adds another—an unlikely memoir about an obscure band that somehow found demand for its reunion in the Internet age…‘I don’t regret a thing,’ writes Fine, and neither will readers who live vicariously through the author’s eyes and memory.”
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Kirkus Reviews (starred review)