Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am one of the barbarians - I love rock and roll.
One way I judge music is whether it compels me to listen to it.
The idea with a collection is sort of to begin with a kind of bang.
If you wanna write non-fiction you have to be interested in the world.
Bonnie Raitt and Lynyrd Skynyrd were two people I went on the road with.
I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.
In the worst of times, music is a promise that times are meant to be better.
As the editor at the Village Voice, I always tried to find writers of colour.
I love collections. I got into journalism with the idea that I'd be doing them.
Rock & roll fan that I am, Thelonious Monk is probably my favorite musical artist.
You can only adjust to so much history in your life. I still have trouble texting.
My personal experience has been that in my free bohemian subculture, I'm not unique.
You know, criticism began as the province of amateurs, of wealthy men who liked the arts.
Even when I was working at The Village Voice, I only put in about 20 hours at the office.
I don't know any celebrities. I know a lot of people that most people have never heard of.
I actually think I learned to write concisely working for an encyclopedia company in Chicago.
I don't like most world music because you need to know what the words are to really understand it.
I am interested in the highbrow/lowbrow synthesis. My sensibility, I am proud to say, is middlebrow.
I'm not that Internet-savvy. I get by. But that's all. I don't have serious skills or any other stuff.
Everything I know about Facebook makes me want to avoid it. Twitter has really improved my reading habits.
But I don't write a full capsule review of anything I haven't heard five times. It's usually closer to ten.
I don't believe in pulling punches or being judicious, as the standard in literary criticism or academic musicology.
I review albums - really positive reviews - I know I'll never hear again, 'cause I'm just not going to have the time.
I don't think that most of my peers in rock criticism are from the West Coast. I think most of them are from the East Coast.
I like to say that I don't have the slightest doubt that Barack Obama read me in the early 80s. It's the kind of person he was!
Prince Rogers Nelson was the most gifted artist of the rock era. Not the greatest genius - just the most musical in the broadest sense.
Once people write criticism about something - and even in 1967 I was far from alone - they're assuming it's art, and art is supposed to last.
If rock criticism is to be a political calling, which has always been my angle, that's obviously not because it's a fountainhead of protest songs.
Chuck Berry's 'Maybellene' hit the airwaves at about the time Alan Freed got to New York, and it was definitely a song I really loved and related to.
Certainly it's much more important for me to go to a good movie and spend a nice night with my wife than it is to listen to a specific piece of music.
I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.
I don't see myself as having had an exceptional life. Yeah sure, I've had an interesting life, but I'm more interested in what's not exceptional about it.
The most important single fact about pop music in the Nineties, is the number of hours made commercially available increased by an estimated factor of ten.
Believe me, I think if I stopped writing when I left The Voice I would have quite a legacy. But the fact of the matter was, it never occurred to me to stop.
The idea is every time I go to a show, that night or the next morning I write it down in the gig log. Sometimes they're very scant, sometimes they're very long.
If you're intimate with a mind as powerful as that of Ellen Willis, it takes you a long time to separate yourself from her ideas. She had an extremely powerful mind.
As a power listener who listens to music between 10 and 14 hours a day and who always has his earphones and MP3 player with him, convenience really means a lot to me.
What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.
When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.
In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.
I don't think it's such a bad idea that people learn the same history in school. I think it tends to ground people and give them something to respond to and react against.
I basically believe that all pop stars create personas and manipulate them. What we relate to are not their real selves; they are projections, which tend to shift in shape.
I'm not happy that death is approaching because I like being alive but I'm glad I've escaped the two-post-a-day economy of contemporary journalism. Good writing takes time.
I think I've had a certain amount of success at making phrases. I'm a good writer. But obviously, I'm incredibly flattered and pleased when people remember things that I say.
Subject is very important. If you're going to write non-fiction the style means nothing or very little. The content justifies the effort you need to put into the writing itself.
I don't have any thoughts on blogs, because I don't read them. I don't read them not out of any principle, but because there are only 24 hours in a day, and I like to read books.
Because I've always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.
One of the many things I hate about Donald Trump is that he embodies a kind of very popular popular culture that, as near as I'm able to perceive and stomach, is of no quality whatsoever.
I was never really a bohemian. I was a sloppy guy who liked cheap apartments and the arts, and who was very left-wing politically as the 60's progressed, though it took me a little while.
I believe that writing on music is experienced inside your head, is not a physically present in the world, it has a different kind of authority and prominence and you absorb it differently.