Michael Azerrad is a busy guy. An American music writer since 1985, he's authored two widely lauded books - the definitive account of Nirvana's rise to fame in Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (1993) and a chronicle of thirteen American underground bands (Fugazi, Black Flag, Sonic Youth and Mudhoney included) that would greatly influence rock music, in Our Band Could Be Your Life (2001). He has also penned for any major cultural media outlets you'd care to name, including New York Times, MTV, Spin, the New Yorker, Mojo, as well as being a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. He spent four years working as as editor-in-chief at the indie music download site eMusic, was co-producer of the 2007 Nirvana 2007 documentary Kurt Cobain About a Son and, not least, he's played drums his whole life.

Azerrad is on his way to Australia to speak at the music industry conference BIGSOUND next week in Brisbane. We chatted to him a week out from his appearance to discuss his approach to music criticism, where independent music is at right now, and whether Kurt Cobain thought his book was any good.

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In your capacity as a journalist, musician, filmmaker as well as music fan, how do you approach writing about music?

I think you bring everything that you have to bear on a writing piece. You know, you have some journalistic chops but you have experience that you also bring to bear. I've played in bands and made records and toured and all kinds of things. So I use that to try and gain some insight with what I'm writing about. But I've also read books and traveled and had all kinds of experiences with all kinds of places and people. And that all comes down to bear on writing. You're trying to use everything you've got to make sense of what you're covering.

Is this the kind of thing that you expect to be talking about at the BIGSOUND conference next week?

Oh. Well you have ask my interviewer Steve Bell [laughs]. I hope to touch on that. I think only a certain percentage of people at BIGSOUND will be journalists, so I think there's limited interest in that kind of topic. But I hope to be speaking more about what it means to be 'indie' right now. How do you cope with what is commonly known as 'the new environment'? The whole web, MP3 paradigm. Things along those lines. What it means to be independent and is that a viable - or even possible - thing to do right now?

I wrote a book about the American indie scene in the '80s [and] I think there's some eternal similarities between that scene and the current scene. And I think some historical perspective is always helpful when coping with almost any new situation.

What sort of similarities do you see with that scene? Because I would have thought it would be the opposite right now.

Well there are all kinds of parallels really. And a lot of it comes down to alternate media. You know, it's just that the internet has made everything writ large. Like in the '80s you had fanzines and you had to photocopy those and put them in the post. Now you just do a blog and post it online. Really it's the same idea. You're doing homemade written media and putting it online. The difference is a matter of scale and distribution. But really it's the same idea. And virtually every aspect of the indie '80s scene has an analogue to what's happening now. The commonality is just industriousness.

Do you think, though, that a lot of the power in the scenes that bands like Fugazi and Sonic Youth and Black Flag came out of, was borne from the fact that it was an insular community railing against the mainstream and commonality? Can those sort of bands still exist in this day and age, with the internet and MP3s and the MySpace mentality?

[Pause] What kind of bands?

The bands that came out of obscurity with their own sort of - arguably 'myth' - particularly in the case of say Fugazi, having established their ideals before they felt like they needed to put tracks on 'MySpace'. So to speak. Do you see that bands can still exist with those ideals?

Oh sure. You know, if you make good music you can have whatever ideals you want. If you have something that people want you can define the terms of your interaction. That's what Fugazi and Sonic Youth had going for them, besides some remarkable social skills and an incredible work ethic. So I think the combination of those three things is still absolutely possible now. And it's not just possible - it's happening. There are all kinds of bands that are around right now that have...some sort of ethic [laughs]. And they're making really great music and they're able to do so on their own terms. I don't think that's changed at all.

But has it shifted from bands "getting in the van" to just posting their MP3's to the right blogs?

Well...no I think getting in the van has become more important because musicians aren't making money on record sales. So they have to tour and they have to play shows and they have to sell merchandise. And they sell limited edition CDs or 45s at the merch table, that's really how bands are making their money now. So getting in the van is maybe more urgent than ever. That's the new model.

I noticed on your current blog you wrote about the Arcade Fire [at Madison Square Garden] recently. (Link). You said you couldn't get past the musical references in their set. I was wondering if it's important to balance your experience and your knowledge, with the naivety that you need to cut to a gut reaction from a band?

Yeah, yeah, I mean you've hit the nail on the head - that is really, really important. I think it's great to maintain that purity as long as you can. But after a while your gut reaction is spotting the sources and things like that. I think you wouldn't be honest with yourself if you just pretended that you liked it without hearing the sources [laughs]. So I think as a critic you just have to be really honest with yourself. You can talk about whether a band is 'good', and I think to a certain extent the Arcade Fire is 'good', but also as someone who is a contemporary of their influences and digetised them so thoroughly, I would be lying to myself if I said I didn't hear all those things in the music, and felt a stronger connection to the sources than I did with the Arcade Fire.

Does the possibility still exist to be surprised by a band?

Oh yeah. Oh, I'm...yeah. It's funny - there's actually going to be a panel touching on this, but - everyone is wired differently. Some people just stop listening to new music in their late 20s, early 30s. And some people remain curious for their entire lives. And so far I've been pretty blessed - I'm still curious and I'm still surprised and I find stuff that just blows my mind and is just incredibly original. A lot of it is happening two miles east of me in Brooklyn. So I'm in a really great geographical place to absorb a lot of it. Of course I'm in New York so most bands come through here anyway. Yeah, absolutely - you know it makes me laugh when people say there's no cool interesting new music and stuff like that. They should get their ears checked or just get out more often, this is one of the best times in music in my lifetime.

It's interesting that you say that. Do you think that particularly with your close relation to Brooklyn - I mean it seems like every second band article these days starts with "Brooklyn-based so and so", it's phenomenal how often that phrase comes up, almost as if Brooklyn is its own country now...

Absolutely, yeah.

Do you feel like Brooklyn has any similarities with - it's a long bow to draw - the idea of a cultural touchstone, like say what happened in Seattle in the '90s or Manchester in the early '80s?

Well I'll say this - it's a testament to the simple and powerful value of human contact. There's so much been made about the global village and people communicating through the internet, and trends getting transmitted from Iceland to Sao Paulo. Or, you know, the Silver Lake suburb of Los Angeles to Brisbane, say. And that's all well and good and powerful and interesting but...there's something to be said about simply bumping into people on the street. Hearing other bands almost by accident. Making friends with people and exchanging ideas, face to face, it's a very powerful thing. And when you get a whole lot of creative people jammed together in one spot, there's going to be a lot of creative ferment and alot of exciting things are going to happen. New York has several times been a real powerhouse for popular music. And we're [currently] seeing one of those periodic crests in the city's musical history.

Could that idea become another book?

[Laughs] Thank you for that idea! I mean people have written about New York music in various ways - I don't think anyone's written a sort of through-line, going back to before Tin Pan Alley. For various reasons the city's always been a powerhouse like that. But yeah that could be a good book, sure.

I ask because your last book Our Band Could Be Your Life was in 2001. Do you have anything else in the works in novel form?

Yeah, I'm working on a book proposal as we speak. For a bunch of years there I was the Editor In Chief of eMusic, which was a music download site that, at the time, carried only independent labels. But I couldn't just write a book and hold down a very demanding day job. But now I'm back in the book world and working on something.

In your time at eMusic did you feel people perceived you working as an online editor as on par with working in print?

No, no absolutely not. No. One of the great satisfactions of that job was that I could give work to some of the great writers. And writers who I think were underutilised. I worked with Kurt Loder and Harvey Pekar - the late great cartoon master who was [also] a great jazz critic. Ed Ward. But also big names like Ann Powers and Simon Reynolds, a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners. There's few things more satisfying to me than giving work to people who deserve it. And I loved that job for that reason. It was really, really rewarding - John Morthland one of the founding rock critics, period. [Laughs]. One of the first people to be a professional rock critic, I had the very great privilege of working with him. Stuff like that happened every day and it was just incredibly rewarding.

With both your books, how hard was it to remain a journalist rather than a confidante? Or is that also part of the job?

Well, with Our Band Could Be Your Life, it was just doing interviews and extensively debriefing people. I certainly became cordial with most of the bands in that book afterwards. But in terms of the Nirvana book, sometimes it was difficult - oh...I don't know, I take that back [pause]. You know Cameron Crowe did a whole movie about this [Almost Famous (2000)]. It's one of the challenges of journalism: how do you get close enough to someone enough to gain their confidence and yet not let what seems to be a budding friendship get in the way of telling what you see as a straight story? And I can only tell you, you try to have as much integrity as possible. And I think also [pause]...I think if you tell the truth, the subject will appreciate it and respect you more than if you caved to what you think they want to hear.

When (Nirvana drummer) Dave Grohl got the book, he called me up and he said: "Wow. It's a great book - and it's all true!" And that was the ultimate compliment. It was all true. Well, as far as I knew anyway [laughs]. And as far as probably he knew, obviously - and he liked it. And I think you can never go wrong with telling the truth. Unless, you know, it may cause physical harm to somebody. But I think the truth is always the best story, and I think anyone with a lick of sense will know that.

I know it was finished only six months before Kurt passed away, but do you know whether he read it?

Oh yeah. He read it [laughs]. And we spoke after the Unplugged show. And he said to me [laughs], "That's the best rock book I ever read". And I said, "Well of course you think so, it's all about you". And he laughed, but he said it was really interesting to read his entire life in order. And he said it was very enlightening - [though] he didn't go into what he discovered about himself. And what a freaky kind of thing to read, your whole life written out [laughs]. Fair few have had that experience.

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Michael Azerrad speaks at the BIGSOUND conference next week. Details at qmusic.com.au