When the creators of the Hard Times committed to celebrating the website’s history in a book, there was absolutely no chance the story was going to track tightly with reality.
The site satirizes punk rock and its adjacent subcultures with Onion-style articles, dozens of which are anthologized in “The Hard Times: The First 40 Years.” Among those headlines, co-founders Matt Saincome and Bill Conway offer “recollections” that paint themselves as two of the worst people ever to run a media company.
Mock-serious flashbacks about brawls, benders, sketchy Russians and desperate decisions appear alongside fake exposes such as “Corrupt Grunge Band in the Pockets of Big Flannel.”
