Quotes About Counterculture

By the '80s, anything to do with punk was perceived as rancid. Me being known as the 'punk poet' meant my work and I plummeted.

Punk helped musical fringes get attention. Stuff like Nirvana could never have happened without it.

I came up in the punk rock scene of Seattle.

There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.

I think, fundamentally, the core of everything I do is punk rock.

I was a punk before it got its name. I had that hairstyle and purple lipstick.

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society. Perhaps, my belief is along the old saying that 'it is always better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.'

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes.

If a rock band throws a TV set out of a hotel window, it's seen as anti-Establishment.

There's a thing in the U.K., particularly in London, where it's kind of the idea of subculture and counterculture and the outside and the idea that it's great to be a freak, and the freak always wins. So I think English girls are a lot less scared of being the freak or looking like an idiot.

When the Doors became huge, what nascent rock intelligentsia existed at the time adored them.

I grew up in that era of Hendrix and Joplin and The Doors, and the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury, and even the Panthers. That was my era; that's what I was into.

C'mon, I mean who didn't listen to 'The Who' in the 60s?

The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?

Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.

Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.

Nothing like being scolded by a hippie.

The underground is not a place but a way of life. You can be underground most anywhere, from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Hermosa Beach, California.

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques.

I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

Then the early punk rock period with Television and the Ramones. That's what I loved- that's what I was listening to immediately prior to when I started to play.

I was into the Ramones, Bad Brains, all of that, when I was in high school.

The '60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.