Record guides tend to strive for an unattainable ideal: it’s next to impossible to reduce any period of popular music down to a handful of albums or songs, but doggone it, do books like these try. Truthfully, the only way to come close to reaching a “definitive” consensus about the most essential pieces of art of any time is to make your criteria as specific as possible, which is actually what writer Andrew Earles attempts to do with Gimme Indie Rock.
By limiting himself to 500 albums, independent releases, and a 15-year timeframe, Earles is clearly attempting to avoid rankling too many people with his selections for what he perceives as the essential documents of the American indie rock explosion in the ’80s and ’90s. (The “American” part of that term is a qualifier, as well; Smiths and Stone Roses fans will have to wait for another record guide.) Therefore, Earles should have found a set of parameters narrow enough to be able to justify claims of essentiality, right?
Well…yes and no. Gimme Indie Rock certainly provides a good survey of this era of music for those uninitiated, but it’s hard to say if the book itself is essential, though many of the albums it covers are.
The seemingly futile nature of the book is acknowledged by Earles in the introduction: record guides are a thing of the past, he says, and the ones that still exist typically cover genres like hard rock or heavy metal, where the fanbase is devoted enough to warrant written anthologies. Indie rock is a different beast, though: as Michael Azzerad described in Our Band Could Be Your Life, American underground rock was bound together by a stridently independent way of doing things, rather than by any musical ties. Earles’ selection of albums reflects that: there isn’t a whole lot connecting, say, The Afghan Wigs to Minor Threat other than that both bands worked outside of the mainstream of American music.
There are moments, though, where Earles plays a little fast and loose with that “independent label” rule. Granted, when talking about the ’90s, it’s hard not to include a few big-label releases, given that major labels were signing any band with a tenuous connection with the American underground. Still, while the profiling of artists like Nirvana and Soundgarden is somewhat unavoidable, it’s a little off-putting to see names like Foo Fighters and Green Day placed alongside some of the truly obscure stuff featured here. Earles does an okay job justifying the Foos inclusion, noting the band’s early debts to Bob Mould and the presence of The Germs’ Pat Smear and Sunny Day Real Estate’s rhythm section, but his decision to highlight Green Day’s Insomniac — the band’s second major-label album and first real commercial flop — is confusing.
Still, all the big names are here. A few (Hüsker Dü, The Melvins, and Dinosaur Jr., to name a few) are represented by their full discographies. I’ll leave it to the music geeks among you to debate whether every album by any of these artists is worthy of inclusion, but Earles does a fair job of justifying these selections, though he clearly has a few favorites in the bunch. (Dude must really like Flip Your Wig and Green Mind.)
Where Earles really shines, though, is in giving attention to bands that probably wouldn’t have otherwise received notice; it’s here where Gimme Indie Rock really shows its value. Most fans may have heard of Nirvana or the Flaming Lips, but it’s highly unlikely that they would have heard of, say, the Bottle Rockets or Lorelei or Ultra Vivid Scene.
It’s Earles’ enthusiasm that carries the book. Record guides can sometimes devolve into dry recitations of basic facts, and those moments do exist in Gimme Indie Rock. Most of the time, though, Earles is bubbling over with excitement to tell you about how great these albums are. It’s not enough for the albums to have an amount of historical importance; Earles seems to care more if they’re really good albums, ones worth taking the time to stop and listen to for reasons other than “importance”. At its best, Gimme Indie Rock shows enough joy to remind its readers why books like these are made in the first place.
This book isn’t destined to be a uniter of minds; any two people who read Gimme Indie Rock are probably going to come away with a few gripes about the albums that were selected and the ones that were omitted. In that way, it’s kind of admirable that Earles chose to lean on records that he loved as the pillar of this collection. His selection may be a little uneven (depending on who you talk to), but it’s clear that Earles wrote this book for the right reasons, and he’s sure to find an audience receptive to his take on this era of American music.