Quotes from Michael Azerrad

The revolution had been largely successful, but as it turned out, the struggle was much more fun than the victory.

no careerist goals whatsoever. "I don't think any of us wanted to be rock stars," says Miller. "That was what I thought punk had set out to do—to get rid of rock stars.

punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can't be popular.

Try to find a little more entertainment from your own resources.' As opposed to going out and buying it.

For a while, there effectively was no underground. "I thought that was the end of what you might call punk rock," says Peter Prescott, "because punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can't be popular.

You're advertising the fact that there's a community here—it's not just this industry that's manufacturing bands, it's a happening scene where people are feeding off each other.

Our technology was a phone, a pencil and pad of paper," Pavitt reveals. "For our first year, our records were warehoused in the bathroom, so you'd have to step over Superfuzz Bigmuff to take a piss.

But maybe the next Seattle will be both nowhere and everywhere—maybe it will be on the Internet.

The Internet allows DIY to range far beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. "I've always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it's a family kind of thing

Bon Jovi's trick is to use heavy-metal chords and still sound absolutely safe. Rock & roll used to be rebellion disguised as commercialism; now so much of it is commercialism disguised as rebellion.

I'm always very careful to make the distinction between music criticism and music journalism. A lot of people don't. But criticism doesn't require reporting. You can write criticism at home in your underwear. On the other hand, journalism takes legwork - you have to get out there and see things and talk to people.

There's no glamour in Nirvana, no glamour at all, in fact.

Ten percent of the American population thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Those are the people that have not learned the skill of filtering information from the vast barrage of inaccurate information that we're all faced with everyday. I think that's a very 21st century skill.

Naturally, no one knows more about music than musicians. They talk about their own work all the time, but they rarely get to talk about other people's music.

As a journalist, I'm not supposed to be the subject, but as an author, I'm fair game - another ingredient in the media soup.

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... -Calvin Johnson

Just as not all popular albums are wonderful, not all wonderful albums are popular.

Los Angeles wasn't a sun-splashed utopia anymore—it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.

Music can inspire people to wake up and say, 'Somebody's lying.' This is the point I'd like to make with my music," Watt told Rolling Stone in 1985. "Make you think about what's expected of you, of your friends. What's expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.

When I peeked out the window into the yard, there was Kurt with some kind of contraption on his head that resembled a tin-foil hat, sneaking around the yard followed by a half a dozen laughing toddlers. Kurt had that million-dollar grin on his face and I could tell he was definitely in nirvana. I guess you could say he was the Pied Piper of compassion.

When he met Kurt and Chris, he was a saute cook at a seafood restaurant on Bainbridge Island. By night, he partied with his friends, smoking pot, drinking, and doing the potent local acid, which many swear has fried the brains of an entire generation of Bainbridge Islanders.

for instance. "When we say 'World Domination,' " Pavitt explained, "we're saying, 'Fuck you, we're from Seattle, and we don't care if the media machines are in L.A., we're going to create our own.

Being a teen was a metaphorical state that could be prolonged indefinitely, a way of being in which one was unspoiled, blameless, enthusiastic, and sincere.