"The point Azerrad wishes to make, I think, is that Dinosaur had a certain crossover appeal in a new indie demographic - basically, upper middle class college kids - due to their occasionally poppy songs, crunchy sound, and J Mascis's embrace of heavy metal riffing; they had access to an audience that just wouldn't go for a band like Big Black, for instance. This might be true as a generalization, but with regard to the students I actually knew at Dinosaur shows at Hampshire in the mid- to late eighties, it's a load of bullshit. The sporty, Vail-hopping, and pot-smoking kids certainly existed at Hampshire - we called them 'preppy deadheads' - but their Little Feat records weren't exactly gathering dust while they went to Dinosaur shows. Azerrad's point is a fair one, but in this case it glosses over the reality of Dinosaur's emergence out of the local Pioneer Valley scene. It's a little too neat. I think what Azerrad wants in general is to establish some continuity between fairly obscure bands like Beat Happening and the Minutemen and huge 'alternative' hitmakers of the early 90s like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins: he wants to argue that D. Boon sweated his ass off chopping the brush and leveling the ground so that Billy Corgan could cruise over the fresh blacktop in his Lexus. It's a reasonable point and probably an honorable one, but really, we don't know why the fuck all of America went out and bought 'Nevermind' in 1992. Yeah, maybe the scruffy surf kids of Hermosa Beach that listened to Black Flag sublated into the upper middle class college kids of Amherst listening to Dinosaur a half a dozen years later, and maybe this indie rock virus eventually spread to every cheesehead in America - who the hell knows."

To read more, buy issue one.