Your Band Sucks, Jon Fine
Your Band Sucks, Jon Fine
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Your Band Sucks
What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear)

Author: Jon Fine

Narrator: Jon Fine

Unabridged: 10 hr 23 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/16/2015


Synopsis

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.

About Jon Fine

Jon Fine is the executive editor of Inc. magazine. Jon has garnered American Society of Business Publication Editors and National Headliner awards for his long-running BusinessWeek column "Media Centric," and his work for Food & Wine magazine won a James Beard Award. He has also served as an on-air contributor to CNBC.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Lee on October 27, 2016

Acquired and read this on the enthusiastic recommendation of a writer I recently met who'd also gone to Oberlin College and graduated in the spring before I arrived in the fall (and is also cited in the acknowledgments). I first heard of the author's band (Bitch Magnet) in the early '90s. The author......more

Goodreads review by Blake on May 29, 2015

Back in the eighties, I was an avid follower of many obscure [and mostly] East Coast indie rock bands. Most of my favorites came out of scenes in Hoboken NJ, New Haven CT, Athens GA, Winston-Salem NC and Boston MA. I was the textbook music geek, on a first name basis with the clerks at my local inde......more

Goodreads review by Scot on June 02, 2015

This book was really disappointing. I was never a huge Bitch Magnet fan, but I did acknowledge their role in the pantheon of indie rock and their importance as a band and in shaping a certain sound. What made me want to read this book was to share the experience of living through indie rock birth an......more

Goodreads review by Steve on April 26, 2015

In reading Jon Fine’s “Your Band Sucks,” I experienced something of an inverse bell curve of emotions that parallels Fine’s re-telling of his life, an act that reveals, among many things, his self-image. On one hand, he's a pitiful, painfully awkward, über-dork, decrying his lack of social skills an......more

Goodreads review by Jack on January 31, 2016

I see a lot of people here didn't care for Fine's "holier than thou" hipster attitude, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of this book at all. In fact, it added another layer of authenticity to the memoir, considering that seemingly everyone into indie (i.e. "college") rock at the time had a......more