Book Review: Jon Fine - Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear)
Prior to reading Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock's Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear) , I had never heard of Jon Fine or his main band, Bitch Magnet. What's truly great about the memoir is that unlike most music biographies or memoirs, you really don't have to. While it does focus on Fine's experiences starting an aggressive, fairly experimental indie rock band in the 80s and 90s, it's written primarily as a music fan with insider information. This makes it perfect for anyone with interest in the 80s and 90s indie rock scene, and more along the lines of Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 than a typical musician's memoir. Since Jon Fine makes his living nowadays primarily as a journalist rather than a musician (he's appeared in BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, and GQ, and is an editor at Inc. magazine), this might be the best written musician memoir I've ever read. It f...