Review: Corporate Rock Sucks Covers the Slow Decline of Punk's Most Important Label

Perhaps boutique businesses with hip tastes can be as bad for bands as the biggest corporation.

Early punk musicians almost universally relied on entrepreneurs, however seat-of-their-pants and undercapitalized, to manufacture and distribute their recordings. For bands with the kind of uncompromising aesthetic that made big entertainment corporations nervous, fellow travelers willing to run labels were important. In America, none were more important than SST Records, home at times to Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, the Meat Puppets, and Hüsker Dü.

The story of that label and its founder Greg Ginn, guitarist for the legendary hardcore act Black Flag, is told in Jim Ruland's Corporate Rock Sucks. The lure of corporate cash is hard to resist—even after launching his own SST, Ginn made (and quickly regretted) a deal with an MCA-owned label that prevented him from using his own band's name on albums for a time.

Eventually, Ginn's own unwillingness to pay royalties reliably (and actions like suing the SST act Negativland, for, as The Village Voice put it, "printing his threat to sue the band") brought about the long, slow, depressing decline of his label's reputation and market power. Perhaps boutique businesses with hip tastes can be as bad for bands as the biggest corporation.