In the form of a prominent tattoo on Kurt Cobain’s arm, the logo of K Records — a hand-inked logo around a capital K — has entered musical and cultural history, though largely as a footnote to grunge. There have been previous attempts to tell the story of the Olympia, Washington–based independent label in its own right: Heather Rose Dominic’s documentary feature The Shield Around the K appeared in 2000, and Michael Azzerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life, which concluded with a chapter on K’s flagship band Beat Happening, followed in 2002. Despite such efforts, both the label and the Pacific Northwest scene that surrounded it have remained the underchronicled property of participants and superfans. Mark Baumgarten’s Love Rock Revolution: K Records and the Rise of Independent Music is an ambitious attempt to rectify this, both by reconstructing the label’s history through the eyes of its founder (and Beat Happening member) Calvin Johnson, and by arguing for the label’s influence on the musical and cultural underground that flourished, with little or no mainstream media attention, in the 1980s and 1990s.
