queer and loathing

Review

Rating: Unrated

(From Booklist) Useful as an update and adjunct to Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001), Sellers’ memoir celebrates the self-conscious, (often) low-tech, deliberately nonmainstream, alternatively distributed (i.e., outside of the major recording companies’ channels) music known as indie rock. Sellers bares his soul from the start–the refreshing opening broadside is titled “I Hate Bob Dylan”–and thoroughly explores what he finds valuable in indie rock and, for that matter, much of life. An accomplished slinger of invective, he provides a rousing evaluation of a phenomenon as ill-defined as its predecessor, alternative rock (alternative to what?), while maintaining the theme of how the mainstream music biz, whenever it’s attracted by indie-rock commercial success, threatens to undercut the qualities of the music that its cultlike following most esteems. Spot-on observations and a willingness to name names and ascribe blame as well as credit make this one of the best resources to date on indie rock, whatever it is. —Mike Tribby
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