Ian MacKaye Quotes
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I think sometimes my humor is extremely dry, and a lot of times I would say things that I thought were very funny but... I have a reputation of - people think of me as a very fundamentalist, humorless fellow.
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When you're in a band and write a song on your own, it isn't fully realized until it goes into somebody else's ears.
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I've done thousands of interviews in my life, and it's a format that I quite enjoy, because I think of questions in interviews as an opportunity to sort of gauge my growth in a way. It gives me an idea of how I'm navigating this world that I'm in.
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I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all. I don't take anything back, so I do look after them to some degree. But my main focus is on what I'm doing now.
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I've always been a bit of a documentarian.
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I had a bartender friend once tell me about a $14.00 shot of vodka, this was years ago it's probably more now. I thought that was crazy. From what I understand, vodka has no taste. I think people like the taste of their money.
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Basically we just created our own label, but again we just did it to document our own music and create our own thing, so the major labels were just always out of our picture, we're not interested.
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Part of the way the work world works is not so much creating a separation between your work and your free time, but creating the illusion of a separation between your work and your free time. Every day is the weekend for me, which means I'm always busy.
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I was into Ted Nugent, I was a Nugent guy. I was a skateboarder listening to Ted Nugent.
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I just have work to do; I just do it.
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I think about Dischord. There's been a pretty consistent notion that Dischord have been some sort of "overlords" of the scene. Some people have felt 'they are too cool for us,' or 'they won't put this out,' etc. All we're doing is our own work, our own thing. That's all we've ever done. Our work.
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First of all, [St. Stephen's] is a radical church. It was one of the first DC churches to have gay ceremonies. A woman said mass there, which almost got a priest excommunicated there; Black Panthers spoke at the church; it was a sanctuary for civil rights protesters and anti-war protesters.
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I never, ever had it in my mind that I wanted to be in the record industry, because I still contend that the record industry is an insidious affair. It's this terrible collision between art and commerce, and it will always be that way.
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I stand behind all the lyrics I've ever written; I don't have a problem with that.
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At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You're dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won't do that to other people.
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I don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.
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What does bother me is that I have to spend time and energy dealing with the ramifications of what people do think about me.
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When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.
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I've had people call me from bands that are very popular, and they're like, 'What do we do? We want to do what you do.' It's almost impossible to do what I do, because you would have to start in 1980. You can't just do it.
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I work so I don't need to make rent through my songs, and I think if more people engaged with music without needing it to provide for their welfare, you're not beholden to anyone.
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I feel completely fortunate to have this outlet for something I don't really feel like I have a choice in, to make music. I've got to make it.
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An unlocked door means that, occasionally, you might get a devil come in, but a locked door means you have thousands of angels just walk by.
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With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.
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I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.