53 Quotes by Michael Azerrad

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.

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.

Just as not all popular albums are wonderful, not all wonderful albums are popular.

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.

In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn’t complacent, it’s stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That’s not wimpy – it’s powerful and productive.

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.

The most surprising and rewarding chapter to write was the Butthole Surfers chapter. I’d always thought of them as a bunch of drug-addled reprobates – which maybe they were – but it turned out to be more complicated than that.

There’s no glamour in Nirvana, no glamour at all, in fact.

Music can inspire people to wake up and say, ‘Somebody’s lying.’ This is the point I’d like to make with my music,” Watt told Rolling Stone in 1985. “Make you think about what’s expected of you, of your friends. What’s expected of you by your boss. Challenge those expectations. And your own expectations. Man, you should challenge your own ideas about the world every day.