Quotes from Michael Azerrad

here I'm finally doing this thing that I've known I should be doing since I was in eleventh grade. I was certain, like all of us were, that we were doing the right thing.

In "The Ballad of Johnny Burma," Miller hollers, "I said my mother's dead, well I don't care about it / I say my father's dead, I don't care about it." At the time both his parents were very much alive. "It was more like cutting loose from all that stuff—they're all dead and now I'm free to be me," Miller says.

We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you're signing a contract because you don't trust the other person to live up to their word

Like Dick, Sonic Youth found beauty and genuineness in the messed-up and broken

There's no place like home / So where am I?" MacKaye sings with undisguised bitterness. "I just felt so betrayed by my friends," MacKaye says, "for doing what I wanted to do, for doing what I thought was the right thing." They performed the song only once, at their first show after reuniting. Afterward Baker and Preslar heaved handfuls of change at the audience.

KNOW THE SECRET: ROCK 'N' ROLL IS A TEENAGE SPORT, MEANT TO BE PLAYED BY TEENAGERS OF ALL AGES—THEY COULD BE 15, 25 OR 35. IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO WHETHER THEY'VE GOT THE LOVE IN THEIR HEARTS, THAT BEAUTIFUL TEENAGE SPIRIT…

The stuff we thought about and the stuff we sang about was the same thing

The idea behind K, as Johnson put it, was to strike "a good balance between running a business and helping people get their thing done." As he wrote in one of K's catalogs, "There are many different ways to measure success besides with a calculator.

do-it-yourself-with-lots-of-rough-edges-who-cares-we-tried spirit

We are perfectly satisfied with the number of people who like the band," Albini declared in 1987 at the peak of the band's popularity. "It wouldn't bother us at all if half that many did. I don't think it would change anything if ten times as many came to see us. It wouldn't change the way we do anything, it wouldn't change the number of people that give a shit, it wouldn't change the effect of the band—it would just be more bodies.

Sub Pop was about developing regionally and conquering globally in an aggressive, flamboyant, quasi-corporate way, while K was about networking, uniting kindred spirits in a benign conspiracy of outsider geeks.

Conley was not, as they say in recovery-speak, a "jackpot drinker," prone to big, messy binges that leave disasters in their wake. "It was more of a controlled, low-level draining of my energies and output," he says. "I could feel my songwriting falling off. I was just having a harder time finishing things, really getting a little stuck.

I was going through enormous changes in my own life, so I thought, 'Well, maybe it's time for something new here.

Gordon wrote in one 1983 essay. "As a performer you sacrifice yourself, you go through the motions and emotions of sexuality for all the people who pay to see it, to believe that it exists. The better and more convincing the performance, the more an audience can identify with the exterior involved in such an expenditure of energy.

The band had accomplished what we set out to do and I felt really good about what we'd done, so it wasn't a sense of incompletion or that sort of gnawing to it. I thought, 'Hey, we did pretty good.

it kind of seemed like we were in a constant state of suicide the whole time. It wasn't like, 'Gee, we're going to become successful and make a lot of money.

Although Mission of Burma and some of the other great Boston bands at the time were truly world class, the indie rock scene in Boston was pretty small and generally unknown to the populace at large," says Kates. "In a city where money and education and insurance and things like that dominate the workforce, what we did wasn't understood by the average person.

it kind of seemed like we were in a constant state of suicide the whole time. It wasn't like, 'Gee, we're going to become successful and make a lot of money.' It was more like, 'Man, we're going to have a lot of fun before the end comes and we all hit the can.

punk placed no premium on technique or production values.

The stage show grew gradually until one day they realized that all the props and special effects took up more space in the van than the instruments.

You will do what looks good to you on paper / We will do what we must.

you might, through an act of bravery—demonstrable, jaw-dropping, minimalist bravery—provoke people to see that there was a behavioral barrier, not a technical or financial barrier, to being up onstage and making the culture happen right now with you and everybody else in the room.

the sensibility, the impulse behind the approach, was cause for serious bonding.

We were just repressed dweebs who opened the hatch where the demons come out and put them in the record bottle," says Durango. "It's a release. Just because we were puds didn't mean we didn't have this aggressiveness