Quotes from Michael Azerrad

why let the truth get in the way of a good story?

Underground rock protested not just with its sound but in the way it was recorded, marketed, and distributed

People made me feel bad when I was a kid," says Pedersen, "so why would I want to go out of my way to make people feel rotten, like somehow they don't belong or they don't cut the mustard?

He says his parents were "really uptight and not very affectionate," and, consequently, young J grew up somewhat aloof and self-absorbed. All the furniture in his room was arranged to create a wall around his bed, and there he'd lie for hours, listening to music.

In retrospect, Hart believes that taking on so many responsibilities may have hurt the band in the long run. "The DIY thing, I don't know, it's like we handicapped ourselves in a lot of situations to maintain that," he says. "There were things that, by all rights, we should have been able to let go of and oversee.

punk rock doesn't have to mean hardcore or one style of music or just singing the same lyrics," he said. "It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art.

The Buttholes, always up for a good submersion in the fetid cesspools of the psyche, were a reminder that the underground was still the rightful preserve of some of the culture's most bizarre manifestations

the band was disgusting but not offensive. This was probably because their grotesquerie was at once so inward-looking and yet universal—everyone appreciates a good doody joke.

The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.

The band readily acknowledged that they borrowed ideas rather than making up their own. "That's all you can do today," Turner explained. "I think you're kinda fooling yourself as a rock band if you think you're doing something really original.

It was a lot more wide open as to what a song was," Ranaldo says. "A song was a lot more about sound and structure than it was about chords and progressions and stuff like that.

an underground music network was starting up: record stores that championed independent labels were beginning to appear in major cities and college towns, college radio was noticing the music, fanzines were flourishing, and an underground railroad of venues was assembling.

Music can bind people in weird ways—socially, information—a lot of people get everything they know from songs and groups.

Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. "But I never thought that you should play up to 'the princeling,' " says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. "So what if nobody sees you playing the fuckin' hero or the star. I never fancied myself like that.

Hardcore's organizational energy was just as important as its musical energy—

Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.

K recordings, Johnson felt, were "folk music, music made by peasants." The label had turned out exactly as Johnson had hoped.

Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway.

You don't have to sound like the Sex Pistols, all you have to be is different to provoke such animosity.

Mould's almost wordless vocals were a direct descendant of John Lennon's primal scream approach, only ten times as horrific; cathartic, ultimately life-affirming, his bloodcurdling howls were as direct, honest, and arresting as an infant's wail. Starting

Mould's almost wordless vocals were a direct descendant of John Lennon's primal scream approach, only ten times as horrific; cathartic, ultimately life-affirming, his bloodcurdling howls were as direct, honest, and arresting as an infant's wail.

The bands of the I.P.U. had created their own movement simply by assiduously seeking each other out and pooling resources and information.

Many copies of the Lungs EP had unique inserts, including dollar bills, locks of hair, Bruce Lee photos, used condoms, old photographs, rubber animals, and blood-spattered pieces of paper courtesy of a friend of Albini's who suffered from chronic nose-bleeds.

So they decided to make their own culture, and it couldn't have been more different