Quotes from Michael Azerrad

Nine Inch Nails' sound is dominated by clanging synths and sardonic, shrieking vocals.

A lot of music fans are still interested in insightful perspectives on music - maybe even more interested than ever, since everyone needs help making sense of the incredible variety of sounds that have sprung up in the wake of the Internet revolution. There's a lot of room for unique, qualified voices who can provide good reads.

For Nirvana, putting out their first major-label record was like getting into a new car. But the runaway success was like suddenly discovering that the car was a Ferrari and the accelerator pedal was Krazy Glued to the floorboard.

Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.

Now that the generation that grew up on '80s indie-rock has attained influential positions in the culture, that music is the new yardstick. And that will shift yet again some day.

I really believe in the power of music - and I mean literally the power of musical tones - to rearrange the way you can think.

The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That works well for reaching very specific demographics, which is wonderful for advertising, but it flies in the face of the common wisdom that people's tastes have become more diverse as music of any description has become a mouse-click away.

I have this theory, bands with enigmatic lyrics attract crazies.

When you're writing, you're only a brain and some fingers, but drumming, you're involving all four limbs, and you're hearing stuff and you're converting your ideas into physical motions, getting physical feedback from things you are touching - it's pretty cool. It's a really a nice contrast to writing.

There's a whole apparatus for indie bands now, but back in the eighties it was just getting built. The early people really took it on the chin.

just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren't manufactured," Watt says, "that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.

We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room until there was nothing left but punks. And then they played country music the rest of the night.

I just hope that maybe some people will read about us and see how we weren't manufactured," Watt says, "that we were just three dudes from Pedro and that maybe they could do the same thing themselves.

Personal purifying is the beginning of everything," MacKaye said. "Once you get your own shit together, once you get your own mind together, it makes life for you and the people around you so much more agreeable and understandable as opposed to constant fucking problems.

Basically, we were misfits, we were people who were looking for a tribe—we didn't feel comfortable in society, so we were looking for our own society

He'd realized the importance of that, of making sure everybody was in on every decision and being on the same page aesthetically with him—and behind the sentiment of the song.

Artistically (and in many other ways), the band was liberated by the fact that they'd never sign to a major label. "In a way, we were cheating because we didn't have that light at the end of the tunnel," Prescott says. "And who knows? We were human—if the light had been there, maybe we would have turned crappy quicker. It's a really hard thing to say. Now I'm glad that it was like it was.

you could perform together because you were coming from the same places in your heart. You may not make the same music, but you feel about music the same way.

Pavitt's goal was to build a national network of like-minded people to fend off what he called "the corporate manipulation of our culture" by the media centers of New York and Los Angeles.

they wouldn't do interviews with magazines they themselves wouldn't read; they would play only all-ages shows and tickets would be $5.

You didn't have to have choruses, you didn't have to have lead guitar solos, you didn't have to have anything," said Watt. The lyrics were basically rants by both Watt and Boon that they dubbed "spiels." "We just say what we say

punk rock could be anything anyone wanted it to be.

When something is so small and so underground, it involves everybody—not just record store owners but club owners, magazines, bands. It was in everybody's interest to cooperate.

It's as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal no," Marcus wrote. "The power of Sonic Youth's no will be negligible; few will hear this music. That the spirit of the act is still at work may not be.