Quotes About Authenticity

His words didn't take stands, just described feelings that a lot of his audience felt, too. There were no strident political exhortations, no hipper-than-thou posturing.

This is what I am trying to do across the board," says MacKaye. "If you're going to see me play music, that's the way it will manifest. If you came over to my house, you'd see the way I live. If I make you dinner, you'll see the food I eat.

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

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.

punk placed no premium on technique or production values.

The band members were outspoken about their distaste for conformism, especially within the post-punk scene, where bands were already tailoring their music to contrived images, threatening to reverse punk's hardwon gains. "It's so much style over content

The lack of fluency in Calvin's voice, his callow, chesty drone is infinitely more affecting than the deftly frantic signification of emotion practised by 'accomplished' singers.

The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid.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.

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.

seemed that the DIY ethos that gave birth to the indie rock movement was threatening to become its undoing. Now everyone was doing it themselves—and a lot of it was mediocre. And like an oversize herd of deer, there was simply too much of it for all to thrive.

Renouncing sex, drugs, and drink was renouncing the unattainable rock & roll myth, making music relevant for real people—you couldn't pursue the rock & roll lifestyle and then get up in the morning and go to school or work.

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.

By the way, you don't need the makeup. Puck said.

It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me.

There was something unmistakably exultant about the mess that Rosa had made. Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.

He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

At the possibility of truly being seen, something in his chest seemed to snap open like a parachute.

Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not "decorate" it; she infused it.

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit

Julie wanted to die of his own whiteness, to be drowned in the tide of his embarrassment on behalf of all uncool white people everywhere when they tried to be cool.

Sometimes even lovers of fiction can be satisfied only by the truth. I

Because you know, truth is, I don't give a shit about some scratched-up vinyl Rahsaan Kirk, Ornette Coleman sound-like-a-goose-trying-to-fuck-a-bicycle bootleg pressing from the rare Paris concert of 1967. I spend five minutes listening to that, I'm like to want to slap somebody. I