I remember watching these kids getting up in the morning on my dorm floor, putting on a suit and tie and a briefcase, talking about this guy from California named Ronald Reagan and how he was going to...
And the twentysomethings are the generation that's been led to believe that they missed out on all the best times. 'That's pretty much the definition of what we are, is punk rockers who weren't into p...
They had the certain knowledge that they were the first American generation to have little hope of doing better than their parents, the generation that would suffer for the fiscal excesses of the Reag...
Picciotto recalled when he was a teenager writing to obscure English punk bands like Rudimentary Peni, Dead Wretched, and Blitz. Those fuckers wrote us back, and it blew my mind, recalls Picciotto. It...
Music journalist Chris Nelson once wrote, Their friendship formed the living core of the Minutemen, while their loyalty to each other and San Pedro informed the overarching theme of brotherhood that p...
It’s as if Sonic Youth has gone back to the very beginnings of the process by which the world reveals itself as something other than its advertisement, as if the band has discovered the most marginal...
Dukowski replied. The easy solution isn’t a solution, it’s the fucking problem. It’s too easy to have someone tell you what to do. It is harder to make your own decision. We put a certain amount of tr...
Boon and Watt had the bad—or perhaps good—fortune to come of age during one of rock’s most abject periods. That Seventies stuff, the Journey, Boston, Foreigner stuff, it was lame, Watt says. If it wer...
For instance. When we say ‘World Domination,’ Pavitt explained, we’re saying, ‘Fuck you, we’re from Seattle, and we don’t care if the media machines are in L.A., we’re going to create our own.
When he met Kurt and Chris, he was a saute cook at a seafood restaurant on Bainbridge Island. By night, he partied with his friends, smoking pot, drinking, and doing the potent local acid, which many...
When I became a punk, my main fight was against the people who were around me—friends, said MacKaye in the essential 1983 hardcore documentary Another State of Mind. I said, ‘God, I don’t want to be l...
We were in Nashville and the whole place was packed with country music executives. They played all their punk rock—just as loud and fast as they could until they virtually cleared the room until there...
There’s no place like home / So where am I? MacKaye sings with undisguised bitterness. I just felt so betrayed by my friends, MacKaye says, for doing what I wanted to do, for doing what I thought was...
The revolution had been largely successful, but as it turned out, the struggle was much more fun than the victory.
Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. But I never thought that you should play up to ‘the princeling,’ says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. So what...
Relationships are currency, something Sonic Youth had picked up on not only from the art world but from the camaraderie of the SST bands.
People made me feel bad when I was a kid, says Pedersen, so why would I want to go out of my way to make people feel rotten, like somehow they don’t belong or they don’t cut the mustard?
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...
It’s just that when you’re playing in standard tuning all the time, Moore explained, you’re sounding pretty… standard.
In terms of the peripherals, the attitude of do-it-yourself, that kind of thing, not being a remote rock star and having layers of management and record labels and all that—instead, booking your own s...