Intro
Our Band Was Not Your Life
A search bar companion by Anand Balasubrahmanyan
Dear Listener,
You'll never find the greatest record of all time. But rest assured it exists. It’s not the consensus best, but for your heart, there will be no better fit than the thrum and thump of this record.
You’ll swear you've listened to hundreds of ‘greatest records of all time.’ Records that hit you like Foreman in the Jungle. Records so prickly and strange they need a passionate defense of their genius. Records that slip into your subconscious over thousands of revolutions until you can't imagine the swirl of your own life without them.
You’ll be grabbed, suddenly, by a melody in the middle of a party conversation, make an excuse and track down the playlist. Fury will grip you when you realize this year’s best-of lists omit some scrappy Scantron three-piece. And then, as the world quakes and all the mechanisms that blare your favorite sounds and arguments have changed, you’ll feel that you have too. Turns out the circular search spun like just another record--not the greatest perhaps, but goddamn, was it fun to sing along.
Hi, I’m Anand Balasubrahmanyan: underground journalist, rock superstar and probably the best temp your office ever hired to file medical records. I’ve spent most of my life growing along to songs. As an isolated Indian teen in snowy St. Paul, MN, I found refuge in the outsider kinship of all ages shows and began a lifelong quest to explore and embrace the unlikely friendships made possible by a great band at full volume. I’ve sung in prog rock bands about the Iliad and rapped in a dinosaur costume. I’ve written for music blogs that have gone out of business and played shows for labels that went out of business at venues that did not realize they were businesses until they went out of business. Shout out to Spoonie in Ottumwa, Iowa.
The title of this book is a joke, sure, but it’s also an attempt to extend the spirit of Azerrad’s pre-grunge history to the global scene in which I found myself: an era where making and sharing music has never been more accessible.
If the indie rock of the ‘80s was about building an off-kilter community from the ground up, the last decade (2009-2019) has seen that community unleash a rambunctious onslaught of sound. The genre opened to a flood of new voices, international influences, and distribution methods.
But while digital recording and distribution allowed more people to make and share their songs, the resulting overload of releases obscured masterworks that many of us never quite found the time for.
The albums explored in these essays will likely not get 20th anniversary re-releases or gushing oral history retrospectives. For the most part they were dropped into the raging river of content, streamed by a few thousand IP addresses and forgotten beneath the grand narrative of art-that-truly matters and the story-of-our-times.
But in a way, their ephemeral release and reception is the story-of-our-times; that art-that-truly-matters can be missed and then discovered anytime, anywhere, by any curious anyone. All you need is a router and a heart.
These albums represent that transcendent glimmer of indie. A genre where intimate discovery and passionate debate are (at least) half the fun. Some tell the story of a micro-scene swallowing itself on the way to transcendence. Some are the culmination of artists driven to show you the world in a way you never realized was possible. Some encapsulate a moment, marking an era or summer fling. Some are just too fucking beautiful to stay unheard.
Rooting around sounds lost and found also reveals how much the conversations we have about music have changed along with how we listen. The globalization of everything from niche to pop forces us to reassess modern arguments that animate cultural introspection--is an artist who avoids industry ties by transforming themselves into a lifestyle brand truly forging independence? Where is the line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange in the age of world-conquering Caribbean trap compilations featuring Ed Sheeran?
While exploring life altering art, I also want to investigate the life experience of the listener today. In these pages you’ll find tales of the discoveries, arguments, and euphorias that engulf the modern music fan. Because, honestly, what’s more rock n’ roll than a belligerent hot take hagiography?
So think of this as a kind of record buyers’ guide for records you will never need to buy. A search bar companion for your post-analog ambling through the ideas, politics and connections made possible by an infinite hovering library of sound.
Love,
Anand
Sept, 2018
