Sonic Youth Quotes
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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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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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I've never been good with structure - doing assignments for the sake of them or doing things I'm supposed to do.
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I don't really feel comfortable anywhere except when I'm working alone at home. It's exhausting to be out around people.
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I was very aware of performers who have a persona, whether it's Siouxsie Sioux or Patti Smith or Lydia Lunch, and I'm just this middle-class girl coming from a more conventional upbringing, this California person. But in a way I felt like it's important to represent the normal.
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When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was.
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After you've graduated, you're supposed to be an adult and go out into the world, and you're still not formed. It's an interesting... horrible, horrible time.
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You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.
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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 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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I really want to start playing basketball. I actually bought a new basketball.
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I went to art school, and I wanted to be an artist since I was 5. I basically moved to New York to do art, and I just sort of fell into doing music at an early age.
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I have a really hard time writing my own lyrics for this record, because one, I had to write so many and also I was kind of perplexed by the idea of how I was going to sing and play... because at that time, we hadn't really thought about asking someone else.
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Buddhism has become a socially recognized religious philosophy for Americans, whereas it used to be considered an exotic religion.
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After Hurricane Sandy, my family and I stayed in our apartment in lower Manhattan before things normalized. We're lucky enough to live on a bit of high ground, so we weren't flooded... but it was intense. Since there was no light, water, or electricity, I spent a lot of time playing acoustic guitar in the evenings.
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We got our first significant pieces of press in the 'New York Rocker' from early gigs at CBGB.
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This was early '90s and in New York hip-hop was coming on really strong; that was the sort of urban folk music that was almost threatening to eclipse rock music and indie rock music in terms of popularity, which it has certainly gone on to do. But you know, this is the end of the 1980s, beginning of the '90s. The whole independent label thing has really evolved to this incredible point from the early '80s when we started, and there wasn't one record label at all, until a couple people started forming these small labels.
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I never do releases to try and make or break some contemporary band.
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I saw the Dead in '73 at Nassau Coliseum, and that same year, I saw them at the crazy, big Watkins Glen festival. It was just outrageous. It was amazing to see the reciprocity between them and their audience.
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It is fun to smash guitars.
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It's hard to get hot over a painting; there's no equivalent for teenage obsessiveness. Art obsession is ideology. Ideology can be made sexy, but it's easier in music.
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Bands rise and surface in the British press so regularly that, for the most part, unless something really catches my ear, I feel like, 'Oh, if they're still around in two years, I'll see what they're up to.'
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I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists.
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Sometimes I think fashion is more of a conversation between men than it is for women.