this blog could be your life

I've been reading Our Band Could Be Your Life, which is a history of indie punk-rockish music from basically Black Flag to the dawn of Nirvana. Much of the book is about bands dominated by young men in the throes of their own anger, like Black Flag, about which it is said:

This was a band whose stand presence one fanzine admiringly described as "comparable to an epileptic boy scout molesting a bag lady" and "possessing all the humor of a muscular dystrophy telethon."

Or, at least sounding angry even if they really weren't, like Husker Du (insert your own umlauts):

"People have misconstrued the pessimism and anger in our songs. We're really the opposite of all that; we're not callous, insensitive people. But we're frustrated by the fact that most people seem to end up that way--hopeless, defeated. We're afraid of ending up that way ourselves...

Against this backdrop comes a chapter on the far more happy-go-lucky Beat Happening:

They were resolutely unmacho and played melodic, downright quaint-sounding music. They could barely play or sing. Implicit in Beat Happening's music was a dare: If you saw them and said, "Even I could do better than that," then the burden was on you to prove it. If you did, you had yourself a band, and if you didn't, you had to shut up. Either way, Beat Happening had made their point.

(As for the title of this post, it occurred to me that many of those who occasion this blog might think of themselves as being too old to have a punk band be their life anymore, and yet they are still alive and not sure what to do with that fact. So, anyway, if nothing else, this blog could be your life. You could sleep over in the sidebar and store your belongings in my archives. Whatever. Just know that mi casa es su casa, mi blog es su vida.)