Michael Azerrad Quotes
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You didn't have to be a huge rock star; you just had to do well enough to continue doing what you wanted to do. It wasn't about hitting the jackpot, it was about sustainability.
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Just as not all popular albums are wonderful, not all wonderful albums are popular.
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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.
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Back in the day, in '91 or so, I tried to interview Fugazi for Rolling Stone, which the band felt stood for everything they detested about corporate infiltration of music. They said, 'We'll do the interview if you give us a million dollars of cash in a suitcase.' Which was their way of saying no.
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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.
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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.
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I would roll out of bed and immediately start working, and keep working until it was so late at night that I couldn't stay awake anymore. Then I'd go to sleep and wake up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. I did that every day for three years.
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Now that the generation that grew up on '80s indie-rock has attained influential positions in the culture, that music is the new yardstick. And that will shift yet again some day.
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The online musical universe has become Balkanized, with many sites focusing on minute niches. That works well for reaching very specific demographics, which is wonderful for advertising, but it flies in the face of the common wisdom that people's tastes have become more diverse as music of any description has become a mouse-click away.
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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.
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For Nirvana, putting out their first major-label record was like getting into a new car. But the runaway success was like suddenly discovering that the car was a Ferrari and the accelerator pedal was Krazy Glued to the floorboard.
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A lot of music fans are still interested in insightful perspectives on music - maybe even more interested than ever, since everyone needs help making sense of the incredible variety of sounds that have sprung up in the wake of the Internet revolution. There's a lot of room for unique, qualified voices who can provide good reads.