Sonic Youth Quotes
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L.A. prides itself on newness or being the last frontier or just not liking old things and tearing them down to build new things. But Malibu history is interesting to me. My mom's family was one of the early families in California, so there's history going back to the 1840s or '50s.
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I'm a slow learner. When people are so talented or facile at picking up an instrument and playing covers, like Yo La Tengo, I admire that. But I could never do that.
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I would be too self-conscious if I just thought of writing lyrics for a song. I have to trick myself into doing it.
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I never thought about doing anything other than making art.
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In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it.
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I've done art on my own, and I've also collaborated with other people to make art. And collaborating with other people is always interesting because you end up doing things you probably wouldn't do otherwise.
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I don't see myself as a rock star. I don't see myself in that way. I'm interested in work that offers some sort of critical dialogue.
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I don't even know if I always entirely get what I'm trying to say right away with lyrics. I like a lot of things that are more subtext. I grew up mishearing lyrics my whole life, but somehow there's so much more, too, that's implied in vocal delivery and the music itself and the gestural quality of it.
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Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up. I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men - white male corporate society. So why wouldn't a woman want to rebel against that?
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I love the way Lady Gaga finds humour in fashion, but it's still very stylised.
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Because our daughters have school and it's just such a hassle going down to New York all the time, we can really only go on the weekends, we kind of... Steve came up here and worked out stuff for the second half of the record.
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Basketball and ping-pong are my two forms of exercise.
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I try not to think too much about what the audience is thinking and what they think I should do.
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I'm kind of a sloppy feminist. Any ideology makes me a little nervous because there's some point where it doesn't allow for the complexity of things.
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Part of my desire to play music was because I wanted to escape the art world and the politics of it; the petty gossip-y art world. But you know, I feel like they're both equal forms of expression.
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I watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' with my daughter. We're very into Buffy and Buffy's friends.
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You know, we have our own audience, and it's not like - they just know we're not going to do certain things.
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I think of myself as unconventional, I guess. I maybe always had a problem with authority, like a stubbornness about what's expected - despite wanting to get some recognition through performing - but also not always wanting to do the expected thing.
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It's really hard for me to sing and play bass. Unless you're singing something that's kind of in rhythm with the bass, the melodies, it's just difficult.
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Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I've always done - to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self.
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I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.
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I never felt like I had anything really figured out. When I was a teenager, it was all about teenagers having an 'identity crisis.' That was the phrase that was used. But in my early 20s, I was still like, 'When am I going to be over that?'
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No one talks about woman power. The Spice Girls - they're masquerading as little girls. It's repulsive.
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I mean, most of it is probably more obscure and just more noisy than either of those two bands, but Thurston has stuff all the time that he's involved with that is fairly obscure and experimental.