"there was a sense of the whole city winding down." "No investment." "No hope." "Just a city in decay and a city collapsing." "It's like a wasteland with, just, nothing." "We had energy." "We wanted to go somewhere." "We wanted to do something." "There was nothing to do." "Nowhere to go." "So you just kind of circle around... walking underneath those housing developments, projects... and concrete, soulless places where there's nothing." "A sort of hopelessness." "But we had hope, in a sea of hopelessness." "It was a very, very squalid period." "Massive unemployment." "Absolutely no hope." "Class warfare rampant." "Quite literally no future." "I wrote my own future." "I had to." "It was the only way out." "The story of punk really begins with Iggy Pop." "He was authentic." "That's the problem with rock 'n'roll... that there's not many really authentic madmen in it." "I hated school..." "I hated being confined in office clothes." "I hated the guys in the fraternities around the college campus... where I lived." "I just hated the whole American dream." "Iggy took the whole ethos of the beat writer... and made it applicable to modern music." "People would lay him side by side with Jim Morrison." "I don't think that's quite fair... because I think Morrison came from much more of a European mentality... where Iggy was so totally American, so totally Midwest." "Did the music of Detroit have much of an effect on your music?" "The industrialism in Detroit... what I heard wandering around was..." " There are 10 cars, and so on and so forth." " Sure." "I get a lot of my influence from the electric shavers..." " It's true." " But it's funny how those sounds... you don't realize how they sound." "What did you do to those nice people out there?" "Lggy walked on people's hands." "Iggy grabbed people out of the audience." "Suffice it to say lggy was a lot more dangerous than Jim Morrison... who might be waving his penis around onstage in Miami." "You thought that Iggy might take the whole crowd with him." "I wanted to have my stuff presented... in a much more shocking way than the next fella... because the next fella was usually better-looking than me." "He could sing better... and they could get a better gig for more money... but the reason they could is because they would imitate... the five most popular English bands of the time." "It was obvious to me... that person that could create something really of their own... that was the person that was gonna have the key." "Do you feel you've influenced anybody?" "I think I helped wipe out the '60s." "The American bands that were influencing me were the MC5... that was just a very heavy, brutal, Detroit... industrial rock ethic." "You were supposed to go out and kick the audience's ass... and everybody'd get sweaty and gloriously beat up." "When I first heard the Velvet Underground... it gave me hope." "Here's a band playing super-simple songs... and the singer couldn't sing." "'Cause I couldn't sing either." "And I thought, "This is great." "He can't sing, I can't sing, let's sing."" "When the Beatles were singing Yesterday... the Velvet Underground were singing songs about heroin." "Singing songs with real substance to them... real stories with real lyrics that gave you pause to think." "It was the height of the psychedelic era." "They were giving out flowers on St. Mark's Place... everybody was barefoot... you brushed your teeth with LSD." "But the Velvets talked about real life on the street... and they played noisy, crude..." "It sounded as if you didn't have to know how to play... to play what the Velvets played." "Obviously it's not as easy as they made it sound... but it was inspiring." "The Dolls were an inspiration, too." "Don't fuck with us, sweetheart." "The punk scene, most people think, started with the Sex Pistols... and the Sex Pistols defined it in the popular consciousness... but the Sex Pistols were influenced by the New York Dolls... and aren't ashamed to admit it." "The New York Dolls came along and returned to the 3-minute song... which is what punk is all about, returning to the idea of a song." "A song that you heard on the radio." "You know, very stripped down:" "Chorus, verse, chorus, verse." "Music you were hearing on the radio in those days was terrible." "Captain and Tennille and all the crap." "I liked the way they were into what kids really liked about rock 'n' roll... which was:" ""Do whatever the fuck you want to."" "Offend the grown-ups and behave... like the way a teenager really wants to behave." "They were so bad." "When they attempted to play rock 'n' roll..." "I thought it was such a cacophonous racket... that it made me laugh." "And their sheer audacity... of being able to go out onstage and deliver this to an audience..." "I thought was phenomenal." "When the Dolls came over... and they played this really boring rock show..." " The New York Dolls." "... wearing their high heels... and, like, stuttering about and smashing their instruments... that was something we'd never seen before." "And it was on television, even better." "It was wild and young and crazy, and these people were having fun." "That was a seed that later grew, I think." "The good life." "La dolce." "Malcolm was here and he loved their style and their attitude... and their aggression and the tension they attracted." "He wanted them to come to England." "He thought if they played there, they'd be a lot more popular... but it was too late for the Dolls." "They were really falling apart." "Johansen didn't want to play... with half the band that was too drunk and stoned to play." "So not going back to anyone..." "Malcolm was there to sell clothes, basically." "You know, he was selling fashions." "And he sold rock 'n'roll fashion." "The best way to sell rock 'n'roll fashion was to have a band." "Slowly I began to move around New York... and found a small bar called CBGB." "It seemed to be a scene." "And there was one character in the corner." "His name was Richard Hell." "And I noticed his T-shirt was very cleverly designed." "Being a haberdasher from the King's Road..." "I was very enticed by this T-shirt." "Holes very carefully arranged in it." "And him playing this song, which was his song... called Blank Generation." "I began to adore the idea... of new rock 'n'roll through them." "CBGB's, you know, there weren't bands playing there when we started." "Part of my strategy was to do as the Dolls had done." "Find a place where you appear regularly... so that people can get in the habit of knowing you're there." "The guy, Hilly, who owned the place, agreed." "So we started playing there every Sunday." "And it was a wino, Hell's Angels bar." "It was just a dump... a bar, and it's in the Bowery, a skid-row section of New York." "Always dumpy and dirty and..." "But at the time there was no place to play your own material." "We liked the place right off the bat." "It had a nice, quaint kind of atmosphere." "And the acoustics were great." "There started being this kind of uptown crowd... mixed with a lot of dancers from Times Square." "Topless dancers and prostitutes and junkies... mixed with these slumming chic people... who thought we were cute and real." "In the beginning, they didn't expect to make any records or make any money." "The whole point was to have a good time... because you didn't have a job you could like... you weren't gonna make any money anyway... so you might as well sing." "If Blondie was playing..." "Richard Hell and David Johansen were sitting there watching." "If Richard Hell was playing, then Blondie and Patti Smith... and the Talking Heads guys would all be around." "I mean, it was all playing for each other... and so there's a lot of pressure... to do something better and not repeat yourself." "It was a place you could go and knew you'd see somebody... you'd like to talk to." "The only place in the world where you mattered at all." "You'd go there and... like, matter." "By the time I walked into CBGB's... which was in 1975..." "I had been in the music business in one way or another for 20 years." "What was great about it, for me... was that it signaled a rebirth." "It was about reclaiming rock 'n'roll." "It was reclaiming rock 'n'roll to a simple message... and wasn't a big, bloated corporate-limousine-cocaine-ridden... bunch of shit." "What a lot of people were doing at CBGB's... was bubblegum and garage rock." "I saw elements of The Beach Boys there." "People thought I was crazy then and I think people still think I'm crazy." "But their songs, they were all very catchy." "To me, they were pop music." "They were what was played on the radio in the '60s, to me." "That's what I heard." "I thought they were the most commercial band." "I was kind of shocked when everybody said, "No."" "Halfway through the third song, I turned on the mike, and I said:" ""What is this crap?" "What is this noise?"" "I took the record off the turntable... and flung the record across the room." "And I said, "We don't need this junk." "This is just noise."" "I went and played a Billy Joel record." "I got hate calls when I signed the Ramones." "They said, "You know, you've got some nice bands." ""Why do you wanna fuck up your label and sign the Ramones?"" "That first Ramones album, it was a fantastic record." "It was conceptually very interesting." "The fact that all the songs were very short... very simple drumming, melody being carried by the bass... the guitar being simply this pulsing distortion... actually became the English punk style." "The Ramones' first album... was almost the only piece of vinyl that we had that we could say was punk." "A lot of people I know learned to play along to that record." "Sid Vicious learned to play along to that record... and Paul Simonon learned to play really along to that record." "Most of the English bands really adapted... the Ramones' distinct sound as their foundations." "And then they injected their own selves... to create their own thing." "When it got over to England... punk became a way to dress, look, and sound." "The New York punk scene was very diverse." "The name of this song is Psycho Killer." "Going down to CBGB's that night when I found the Talking Heads..." "I was down there to see the Ramones, who I had just signed." "It was a beautiful night in November." "It was almost like spring." "I was standing there with Lenny Kaye, the guitar player... in the Patti Smith Group... and all of a sudden, I hear music coming out." "I felt myself just moving more and more... till I was inside the door and I was riveted." "I wanted to sign them right then and there." "That night began an 11-month courtship." "When I started working with them, they weren't sophisticated... in using studios." "So I think I opened them up to the conceptual notion... that making music involved everything... from the first note you play... to the moment this thing comes out as a piece of plastic." "Talking Heads are an intelligent band... and ready for trying something new." "I don't know if that would have been true of all punk bands, by any means... or new wave bands, or whatever they were." "If you're content to stay in a small club and not do anything else... then you're also not content to grow." "Part of the trick is getting yourself out there... and challenge yourself:" ""Can you make a record and remain true to your ideals..." ""and still sell those..." ""you know, 20 billion records?"" "The scene at CBGB stayed so out of the mainstream for so long... that all the bands were able to fully explore their personalities." " You know, including us." " Thank you." "It was a great time because it was just so spontaneous and pure." "And, of course, everything... after a time, it evolves into something else... but there's always these little pockets of time... where everything just sparkles... and everything is done because people believe in things." "There was something about her music that separated her... from the rest of the pack." "I think that was the mixture of the profane... which was common in punk, with the sacred." "And plus she was a poet, you know?" "I mean she was a poet in the true sense of the word." "She mythologized herself... like any really great rock 'n'roll star does." "...spinal stars in the noir crayola field we call sky." "'Scuse me!" "I tripped and dropped my hand in his." "It la la la landed like an insect nest and... all the red wire spiders jabbed in his flesh like g-strings." "It was so easy to transform everything into guitar strings illuminated calligraphy." "Everything was something else." "A sound was a room, a spongy layer of flesh, a trampoline..." "Patti sort of evolved her poems into rock 'n'roll." "In fact, what was amazing about her in that period... was the way that she would just go off into the stratosphere... into the astral plane." "She was performing in half a trance." "I met Patti Smith just about 1970." "And since Patti had grown up in South Jersey... and I grew up in Central Jersey... we shared a lot of the same reference points." "And at the time I was working at Village Oldies on Bleecker Street." "She would come in on Saturday nights, and we'd drink beer... and dance around to the Dovells or the Moonglows... and have a lot of fun." "She knew I played guitar, and she said:" "'"I'm doing this poetry reading." "You want to do a couple... '"" "We didn't even call them songs." "Just '"play along with me. '"" "CB's was so important to us for giving us a place... to really understand who we were... especially in the improvised songs." "Patti would tell a different story every night... and we would just follow along." "We would go around the country and every town we would visit... we would see little pockets that would become... the alternate rock scene in that town." "You go to San Francisco... and Crime and The A vengers would be at the show." "You go to LA, and The Zeroes and The Germs would be there." "I mean, you go to England... what would become the Clash, the Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde... they were all there." "And we all felt like there was a real mood... of not only us against them... but a sense that it was time for rock's regeneration." "We thought the rest of the world will catch up to this... and they'll realize what we're doing." "They never did." "And then, of course, the Sex Pistols came along and buried us all." "We didn't know it at the time, but all over London... there was nucleuses of people who were looking for something... other than what they'd been given." "And we were all probably 19 or 20... and we'd grown up watching everybody else shine... and we really didn't feel as if there was anything that was our own." "We were living in a squatting community where no one had any money." "So we just broke into houses and lived in these abandoned houses." "I looked at the people I was living with and decided... that I could form them into a rock 'n' roll group." "I was working for a cosmetics company, Elizabeth Arden... in a big glass building, working as a computer operator... and I was feeding punch cards into this machine." "In fact, we were connected up to the main computer... which was one of these billion dollar brain jobs." "We were all people who always dreamed of making music... but the right circumstances never seemed to be there." "And bit by bit, the scenes have created the right circumstance." "And one of the things that drew us all together... had a lot to do with the shop that Malcolm McLaren had started." "Originally, it was a Teddy boy shop which aligned it with rock 'n' roll... and then they made it into this sort of sadomasochist store called "Sex."" "Basically, here was a shop that was selling black rubber... black leather, fetish wear, on the King's Road... to everyday kids, who were searching for a scene." "It was the kind of store where you could go in and just hang out." "I got talking to Malcolm." "We became kind of friends." "But I was stealing clothes off him as well at the same time." "Some of those kids began to ask me... whether I was interested in helping them... become rock 'n' roll stars." "I wasn't." "I'd had enough after the New York Dolls." "I really was more interested... in working in this sort of fetish fashion in clothing." "But it soon dawned on me... that music needed to give it some propelling force." "I used to steal a lot of bands' equipment." "He said, "Why don't you learn to play some of this stuff..." ""and get a band together?"" "So that's what I did." "I was spotted on King's Road... in a "I hate Pink Floyd" T-shirt." "I'd personalized it myself." "That, at the time..." "I know it seems hard to believe now, when you look back at it... but that was just about the most insulting thing you could ever do." "They were as popular as the royal family." "We said, "Can you sing?"" "He said, "No, but I can scream and shout."" "I said, "Come back to the shop."" "And there was a jukebox in the corner." "We said, "Sing along to a song, then."" "Actually, I picked the Alice Cooper records... because the rest of the stuff they had was unbearable to me." "So I put the song on." "John was at the other end." "We all stood by the jukebox and watched as he performed..." "looking and behaving like the Hunchback of Notre Dame." "He was just taking the piss out of the song when he was singing it." "I hated the guy." "And that's actually how we got our sound." "I couldn't play, and Johnny Rotten couldn't sing... and it created this horrible noise." "John Lydon's voice, just this big hell... was the sense of exorcism." "The Sex Pistols were just blowing everything out of the way." "It was an incredible roar of rock 'n'roll." "Everything that was going on in town, it was completely over... the second they came out on stage." "And I saw that." "That's when the old scene died, and the new one began for myself." "The thing about the Clash is that... they were a lot more experimental with music than the Pistols." "The Pistols had their particular sound, and they went with that till the end." "And we'd just try and play anything... that we thought was good." "They were obviously looking at one of their first loves, which was reggae." "The kind of minimalist aesthetic of punk... had a lot to do with what was going on in dub, early dub." "Completely destroy the track and double and triple echo... and that was dub." "It had that urgency that you get from documentary footage." "You know, as soon as you see grain on television, you think, "This is for real."" "The white kids, they never had any form of expression... and reggae was a sound that spoke about my people... my problems." "It was both a protest movement, underground, outside." "It wasn't the only rebel sound around." "Bernard Rhodes, who'd introduced me to Mick and Paul... he'd say, '"Why don't you write about what affects you?" "'"The dissatisfaction among the young people." "'"The way everyone seemed to be going nowhere. '"" "We were tagged as the more positive thinkers." "The Pistols would smash everything down... and we would come through with something... another set of values or a way to be, to think, to feel." "It was a lot to bond you together." "Wherever the Clash or the Pistols played... when people saw them after they'd finished playing... six or seven other groups would start up from that night." "They were something the fans could get into themselves." "It sort of said to everybody, '"You can do this, too. '"" "They played three chords, it was good enough." "It didn't matter." "Everybody was playing the same Chuck Berry chords... putting the new poetry on top." "On sale, 50 p's, from the box office." "It happened everywhere." "It was amazing, really." "I had no hope of a job." "If I did, it was a job I didn't want." "The qualifications I have wouldn't have given me anything." "So I had nothing, and the great thing was... that you had a way of life that you could tap into." "A music way of life." "You were actually creating a future for yourself." "I was still struggling, trying to get my songs to publishers... going into people's offices with a guitar... and making them sit down and listen to me play... and not really getting anywhere." "They weren't really terribly interested." "There just started to be a few rumblings of things going on." "I used to read music papers 'cause that was my only contact... with the professional business, really, apart from rejection letters." "Sometime in '76, the founding of the label, Stiff Records, was announced." "It had been a long time since such a record company existed in England." "They're more or less inventing independent record labels... or reinventing them." "I took an afternoon off and took my tape to this office in West London... and there was just one girl in the office." "There was nobody there." "Next thing I know, they said, '"You'll get to make an album." ""But we'll call you Elvis." I said, "Are you out of your mind?"" "Stiff had this energy." "They were thriving off these things happening in London." "All this punk stuff I was reading about." "I found myself involved in a company that had something to do with it." "We was starting to make some noise in the music press." "We'd play at some clubs, and a fight would break out... and there just happened to be a photographer there." "And they'd catch the fight..." "There was always something going on." "I mean, something out of the ordinary." "Good Lord." "Now, I want to know one thing." "Are you serious or are you just making it up?" " Shit." " It's what?" "Nothing." "A rude word." "Next question." " No." "What was the rude word?" " Shit." "We didn't know this was going out live." "Dirty bastard." " Again." " You dirty fucker." " What a fucking..." " That's it for tonight." "The phones are all lighting up." "Lights were going on everywhere." "Malcolm come running out as red-faced as you can imagine:" ""Quick, let's get out of here."" "The following day... was incredible." "Every newspaper ran headlines:" ""The filth and the fury of the night the air turned blue."" ""Call it punk, we call it filthy Lucca."" "I had to go to work that day and sat with everybody." "There were middle-aged guys reading the newspaper... with steam coming out of their ears." "It was really funny." "About the word '"punk. '" It means worthless, nasty, jolly rotten." " Are you happy with this word?" " No, the press gave us that." "It's their problem, not ours." "We never called ourselves '"punk. '"" "It just became like the circus, doing something to get in the press." "That was McLaren's thing, to keep the media thing going... and the music really kind of went out the window." "One week after EMI dumped Sex Pistols, AM Records picked them up... before EMI could get rid of them and had to buy off the contract." "Here they were, signing a new contract that could make them a lot of money... and they already had a song to record for AM in honor of the Queen's jubilee." "You thought you'd gotten rid of us, didn't you?" "But you are wrong, old bean, 'cause we're back with a vengeance." "God save the Queen, my son." "About that time, nobody in England said anything bad about the Queen." "There was this incredible attempt to stop anybody hearing it and buying it." "We could no longer play anywhere." "The records were never gonna be heard on the radio." "They were banned." "We could take a boat on the Thames, and we could play on the water... a quarter of a mile behind the Queen's flotilla." "The boat was finally surrounded by the river police." "I was arrested and spent the night in jail." "And God Save the Queen did become number one." "You cannot affect change... unless you attack the very things that are keeping you down." "The class system in Britain, this is perpetuated continually... by the very idea that you have a royal family there... and that's not to be tolerated." "The Sex Pistols' current record God Save the Queen... is at number one... but the IBA, which administers the Broadcasting Act... has advised us that particularly at this time... this record is likely to cause offense to a number of our listeners..." "There was such paranoia around the city." "Paul Cook was violently attacked." "Johnny Rotten and Chris Thomas were attacked with knives." "I, funnily enough, wasn't attacked at all." "We had to be careful 'cause a lot of reactionary people... come out of the woodwork." "Maybe they just wanted... to teach us a lesson, so they would say." "So, it did get quite heavy." "When all is said and done, really all I've seen... is a bunch of spotty kids being naughty." "Somehow, it worked." "We hit on something there, not deliberately so." "Instinctively." "The album came out." "It was again a public scandal." "The name was considered too vulgar... and we were destined to go to America to tour." "It was Malcolm's idea when the Pistols came over to America... not to play the typical rock star hangouts... not to come to CBGB's, and not to go to The Whiskey in Los Angeles... but to come and play in America." "We played at bars that were in shopping centers... and we played someplace in Oklahoma City and Dallas... and God-knows-where." "All these places that were not really at all... on any kind of standard rock tour route." "But they were bars that local bands used to play in... so they'd play for these people who wanted to hear rock 'n' roll... and it was pretty rowdy, pretty loose, and pretty real." "He fucking put us right out there in the boonies." "You know, deliverance." "It felt like we were just like a circus, you know." "And Sid was so out there, he didn't care." "He would fight anybody." "Can't believe someone didn't get shot." "I didn't give a shit about the music anymore." "It didn't matter." "You know, it was all about..." "It was just..." "We were all off the edge, totally wasted all the time." "When you first go out on tour, and you're traveling in a coach for 10 months... and it's a shock to the system for a lot of people." "Some people take to it better than others." "And others start having to take pills." "You're partying a lot and staying up late because you like it." "When we got to San Francisco, so much was going on by that time... we just totally burnt ourselves out." "I think everyone had had enough by that time, that we didn't want to carry on." "Coming to America was like the nail in the coffin." "I drove almost 200 miles from Silver Springs just to see it." "I enjoyed every minute of it." "I'd drive 200 miles again tomorrow night." "I really enjoyed it." "I'd think these people are where it's at right now." "It was great." "That's what music's meant to be." "I think that's where rock is going and where it's going to stay." "My sound was really horrible." "Nothing worked." "I had a terrible cold." "Sid was, like, fucked up." "We didn't play any note." "And John was like..." "Mr. Righteous and Dig My Life, you know what I mean." "The ego was of fucking blown out of proportion." "And I just thought when we were playing the shows:" "'"What the fuck's this all about?" "What's the purpose?" "'"This ain't how it used to be like. '"" "We were playing like shit and everyone was loving it." "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" "Good night." "When I said, '"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" "'"..." "I meant that for us, who had to perform this stuff." "'Cause that's what it had become by then, just stuff, just rock 'n'roll." "Just trundling out night after night." "It lost its point." "It was too much like a Rolling Stones-on tour affair." "Too big." "And indeed, when things get that way, then you should stop." "It's the easiest thing in the world to just stop." "If you don't want to be a pop star, just stop being one." "The Sex Pistols came along, made incredible amount of chaos... and then broke up." "And left everyone else to clean up their mess." "The Ramones had to go out there and keep playing." "We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become... almost like the Beatles and the Stones of the '60s." "Like, we were the new revolution, let's say." "But America wouldn't have it that way." "And no record company wanted to touch anybody after the Sex Pistols... who was in a punk band." "I liked the Sex Pistols but they were just there for a second." "They were gone really fast." "By the time the Sex Pistols had come and gone... there were these great LA bands playing." "Punk, in the neurosense of the word, where you had to play a certain way... sound a certain way on record, look a certain way... probably worked in England because England was..." "A:" "Much more fashion conscious, and B:" "Poor." "That kind of punk, that kind of anger certainly doesn't work... in a '70s America where kids have plenty of toys to play with." "So, music of rebellion, or music that challenges establishment... had to take a different form in America." "Basically the 200 people that made up... the original punk rock scene of LA were people who didn't fit in." "And it wasn't just artists... it was working-class people that were bohemian." "The time that we began X, it was a frightening time... because people didn't want to know what we were talking about." "What we wrote about was how estranged we were... and we wrote a lot about being poor and seeing a lot of wealthy people." "'Cause it was still the Hollywood scene, there were still movie stars... and rock stars and producers and people getting big deals." "There was still Fleetwood Mac, and we were so different from that." "It was just like Los Angeles in '66, '67." "The same kind of street-club activity was happening all over again... in '78, '79, '80, and I was just absolutely hooked." "I was everywhere in that day that you could possibly go." "And I told everybody, I said, "None of you know this..." ""but this is exactly what we did 15 years ago, the psychedelic generation..." ""and you guys are now totally insane punk rockers."" "X was one of the most exciting bands I'd ever come across... and I couldn't believe that they were actually poetic." "The lyrics had that kind of street, beatnik impact... took me back to '58, '60, '62, when the beats were at their height... and I thought, "Man, this is the same kind of stuff."" "And everything went along just great until, at some point... the audiences went from being relatively intelligent... and understanding, interesting people... to kind of scary young kids who liked to spit at the bands a lot... who wielded chains and beat up people who had long hair." "And it became a kind of a war between what was... and this kind of new, hard-core scene." "Along with the misfits, there were some who were genuinely psychotic." "And they were there to inflict pain... and not to be part of the core audience." "A song like Johnny Hit and Run Paulene, we don't play because the audience..." "I've seen too many 19 and 20-year-old boys... men... boy-men, going like this..." ""Johnny hit and run Paulene," and don't know that it's an antirape song." "And they're into it for the wrong reasons." "So, we don't play that anymore." "Society stinks." "But this hard-core scene was particularly scary and violent." "It was what gave punk a bad name." "We kept begging them to stop spitting at us." "The media wants to make this into a cartoon, and they say... in England bands get spit at by the audience." "This spitting was just utter nonsense, journalistic fabrication." "Unfortunately, the newer crowds that came into it... didn't understand that." "Spitting on your heroes has been popular ever since in different ways... and maybe that's okay, and maybe that was..." "The part of punk was the thing about the antihero, really." "Yeah, a healthy disrespect for authority... is what supposedly runs through the whole history of rock 'n' roll." "Stop!" "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen." "There's no reason to do this song here." "That's what the irony was about, because in a corporate society... where a few record companies and a few TVnetworks control everything... if you're an act signed to a label and you pretend to be a rebel... it seemed to be a bad joke." "I was never a part of any punk rock thing." "I used to read about it." "But it was some sort of elitist thing to me." "I lived in the suburbs." "I couldn't afford to go to nightclubs." "I had a wife and kid, and I had to go to work." "If music was gonna pay my way... it had to pay my way to the same extent as my job." "I've had a strange career in the sense... that I started out on an independent label predominantly." "I was signed within six months to a very big corporation in America." "I was a pop star, you know." "There's no other word for it." "I found it really at odds with what I believed... being a musician in the long term was." "From there on, I just did whatever the hell I wanted to... and left it to the record company to sort out." "That's their job." "Mine's to make the music." "Theirs is to sell it." "And it never said in my contract... that I had to make the same record over and over again." "I think it's harder for people to change the rules in rock 'n' roll... because it's such a very, very limited form musically... that it comes down to somebody's imagination... what they have in their heart." "As soon as the people got hold of the idea that it's punk." "We get it." "We got it." "And then, when we started to play other things... they didn't like it 'cause people don't like change." "When you step into that public arena... on one hand, it's maybe where some of the greatest possibilities are located... at the same time, it's the most dangerous place... because it's where you're most easily subverted." "To reach a wide audience, you have to give something up." "People still hate us in England for making it in America." "I'm glad we did." "You know, somebody had to break out... and prove that this thing was a global thing." "It wasn't just a neighborhood thing." "When you're struggling to get somewhere, the struggle can really hold you together." "It's not a blinding rush for fame." "You're expressing your soul, and you gotta do it in the right way." "What killed us was success." "For some reason, we weren't prepared." "We'd spent five years getting there." "Perhaps, after five years, we'd said our piece, if you like." "A lot of the great groups didn't exist for very long." "To lump artists like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Elvis Costello... under the banner of punk is really an indication of how categories fail." "I suppose everybody wanted one band to do it like it happened with the Beatles." "And it turned out not to be one band... but a lot of bands, a lot of journalists... a lot of young people who went into the record companies and changed them." "I remember when Seymour Stein sold Sire Records to Warner Bros." "Bugs Bunny, the Warner Bros. Character... was in advertisements in a black leather jacket saying:" ""Don't call it punk." "Call it new wave."" "So, new wave was really a term for college kids, you know." "At the time everybody said:" ""I don't like the Ramones, but I like the Talking Heads."" "It was safe." "New wave was safe." "Punk rock wasn't necessarily very musical or melodic... and I think new wave is when things..." "You know, a few jangly guitars and melodies." "I guess." "I don't know." "We thought we were a punk band for about a minute." "Very early on, just after we'd figured out our barre chords... we realized that we wanted to say more than "Fuck off."" "Even though there were some cool ways of saying "Fuck off" around at the time." "New wave is watered-down." "That was the complete corruption of everything." "It's where everybody tried to be nice all over again." "Don't be nice." "It's the kiss of death." "We were trying to change something." "The music industry." "The way we live." "You know, to be accepted in a way we wanted." "I've always believed that to be esoteric... or underground, music of one generation... becomes the pop music of the next generation." "You know, there's jazz purists... whose job is to keep it pure and the same." "Rock 'n'roll is the opposite." "It started as a bastard, as a hybrid." "It was never pure to begin with." "When the punk rock groups started, it was an '"us and them '" thing." "The establishment was '"them, '" and there was '"us. '"" "But I think they had to grow up very rapidly." "Because some of them became successful, got deals, and realized that really... they had to work with the system to get anywhere." "Some handled it, some left totally devastated." "They got money... and consequently didn't get that creative 'cause they weren't hungry anymore." "Or they could buy more drugs, and they ended up dead." "You know, only the people that had any real... content and staying power, managed to get over that hurdle." "Most of the musicians I know, their work is the core of their identity." "It's a good deal of what they created their identity from." "It's fundamental to you." "You feel like it is you." "And so, when you step into... the mass cultural arena..." "Like I said, there's a real element of "You're on dangerous ground."" "At the same time, I always thought that that was where... you found out what you could do." "American corporations took 10 or 15 years... to recover from the shock of the Sex Pistols... and the fluke of actually managing to sell the Clash to the general public... to really take a step back and find Nirvana and a few other bands." "Punk came..." "You know what it was in England." "That was the last time anything important happened in England... or came from England to affect anybody." "You know what happened is that punk said:" ""We're fed up with Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin..." ""the sort of skeleton of the Beatles." "'"Let's have some music from the street. '"" "And what's happened in America in 1991, '90... is that you finally got your own punk." "I didn't know him, you know." "But I know that... that type of success is very stressful on you, you know." "It's very stressful." "And because you're constantly..." "You feel yourself..." "You think you feel yourself slipping away in some fashion." "Maybe you're not." "Maybe you are, you know." "It brought home to me... as many things have in my maturity... the fact that this is a very dangerous business." "It's very dangerous for the practitioners." "It's like a fire... and it burns, and it burns..." "And that sounds like a sort of romantic fire idea... until you realize that what's keeping the fire alive is bodies." "I think rock 'n'roll exists... to deliver this truth that needs to be constantly delivered." "Rock, hip-hop, whatever you call it." "It reminds us, like this unspoken message... is that it is fun to be alive." "It's a hell of a lot better than being dead." "I think that my whole life was saved... and opened up and made into a real life by my favorite singers." "By Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters... the Rolling Stones, the Beatles." "I'm gonna forget so many people." "John Lee Hooker." "I'll forget a lot of people, but yes, by the stuff that went before." "Rock has thrived on people not necessarily willfully throwing things into the mix... but stumbling on things, crossing over short circuits and misconnections... and the people who have the tight... spandex pants on and their hair just so and the guitar at the right angle... aren't it at all, you know." "The cigarette coming from the lip like this." "'Cause it's a facsimile that was previously rock, doesn't make it rock 'n' roll forever." "It's somebody in a bedroom somewhere doing something you haven't heard yet." "With any luck." "How did the audience react when The Stooges first started playing?" "What did you look like?" "I appeared in an aluminum Afro wig I made myself... out of strips of heavy-duty aluminum which I curled." "No eyebrow and a woman's maternity smock, totally white-faced." "I was playing a Hawaiian guitar, standing on..." "Another fellow who operated a Wearing blender." "There was another guy whose job it was to just tip over the top of an amp... at certain times with the reverb turned on 10." "It was like..." "I also played vacuum cleaner." "And people found it really interesting." "and more sex appeal than ever." "By beaming rock videos around the world..." "MTVbecame music's first global network... and created a powerful new corporate medium... complete with wild imagery and calculated self-censorship." "At the same time, inner-city youth were improvising... a controversial medium of their own in the form of rap." "By the '90s, the scene had come full circle with alternative rock." "The new wave would become a big business... but only by climbing up from the underground." "Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n'roll." "You'll never look at music the same way again." "When MTV started, we were naive, idealistic, and hopeful." "We thought, "This is it." "Everything Devo'd thought and been talking about..." ""what we'd wanted to happen is happening."" "We want to create this thing called MTV, a new attitude." "We were going to be the first TV network ever... to sell the network identity as opposed to selling its programs." "Television used to be called a vast wasteland." "That was before Music Television, MTV." "MTV felt very revolutionary then." "MTV was very much in everybody's face, and there wasn't much on it." "We'd be in an airport... and people were coming up to all of us and going:" ""Hey, where's your top hat?"" "Or, '"Where's your motorcycle?" "'"" ""What are you talking about?"" ""We saw you on MTV."" "And this became the thing... that changed MTV's relationship with the music business." "When the artists started hearing everybody say, "I saw you on MTV..."" "they started saying, "Saw me doing what?"" ""I saw the video where you were doing this."" "They thought, "I never saw that."" "For months, we were going, "We gotta see this MTV."" "And the groups then got involved in the creative process." "We went to Warner Bros. And said, "We're gonna do a video to Whip lt. '"" "They said, "Why?" "The song's already charting." "What do you need a video for?"" "And we said, '"We just think we should do one." "'"We want to have this girl, and Mark's gonna whip her clothes off. '"" "Of course, they said, '"Absolutely not. '"" "So we did it anyway with our own money." "This was the image of men and women... as corporate advertising likes to portray them." "Your all-American, Budweiser kind of guys and girls... the good-looking jocks and jockesses." "We were to appear on the Lily Tomlin special the week this was finished." "She said, "Do you have a video for this song?"" "We proudly said, "Yes, we do." We sent it, and she canceled us." "We thought people would see the irony and sense of humor." "I thought it was pretty obvious we were doing satire." "In those times, it seemed fun to do videos." "There weren't too many of them, and it was fun to see yourself on TV." "The first video we made, Our Lips are Sealed, in the car... we thought, "What is a video?"" "We just didn't take it seriously at all." "We went driving around the city and jumping in fountains and things." "We thought it was ridiculous that we were doing it." "Little did we know that, that medium became such an important part of music." "At the end of '81 is when we started touring with The Police." "We opened for them, and that's really what blew the lid off of it... when our record went to number one and theirs was still at number six." " Sorry, but, you know..." " The opening band." "In those days, it was very different." "You could make an album, two albums." "The record company would still be behind you." "It wasn't such a fast turnover as it is now." "There was much more..." "The record company believed in development then." "It wasn't about, "If you have two singles and don't get your video on MTV..." ""then you're finished."" "At first, the general consensus was that I would never be a pop star." "They wanted to release Do You Really Want to Hurt Me." "I was against it." "'"This shouldn't come out as a single." "This will be the end of us. '"" "And I was wrong." "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me was something sincere... that I'd written from a real-life experience." "It had black and white minstrels in it, and black guys painted black." "For some reason, MTV decided that they couldn't show that." "MTV in the early years was bullshit." "I didn't understand it, never watched it, didn't care about it." "So, we have Kurtis Blow with The Breaks." "We have Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash with The Message." "And they couldn't get arrested on TV." "Rap not only had a problem with television... it had a problem with radio and black radio." "Here you have a community... that had nothing to represent themselves." "Nothing." "Everything was somebody else's expression of reality and society." "So we were forced to take that, mutilate it... and give it back as our expression now." "At that time, breakdancing was a real big thing then." "This is where you would have two males, or two females... or a male and female compete against each other." "Graffiti was a thing for all the artists." "Graffiti is not an art... but I can sure as hell tell you that that's a crime." "You could just jump the fence." "It was like a schoolyard fence." "You could go into the yards and put your name up... then wait for the train to go by, and that was your finale for the day." ""Wow!" "My name is traveling all through New York city."" "Hip-hop is the umbrella." "Hip-hop is the way you move your body." "It's the way you talk, the way you think, the sensibility." "It's the way you..." "Whether it's graffiti, popping and locking, breakdancing, and everything else... it's the sensibility." "And it's one of the richest sensibilities... that's come along in a long, long time." "You had your solo rappers, Kurtis Blow and Melle Mel." "But then you had the Furious Five, Treacherous Three, Double Trouble." "So this is how two MCs would do it at the same time." "But the first guy on a B-Boy rapping tip..." "What I mean by "B-Boy," you know, over breakbeats with a DJ... and cutting it up." "The first guy that fascinated me was Melle Mel, because he was clear... he had a good voice, and he rhymed on beat." "And his DJ was fascinating." "DJ Flash was incredible." "I had come up with... a mixing technique which I called the Quick Mix Theory... where I was able to take two copies of the same record... on two different turntables... and repeat the climactic part of the record over and over again." "And this was around 1979, where I kind of saw this guy do it." "I said, '"This guy's got it right." "This guy's doing it right. '"" "When we heard a rough draft ofthe Message... the lyrics were quite dark." "We felt, '"Why would the world want to hear something like this?" "'"" "It was like an explosion." "You would hear it on BLS." "You turned the dial two notches, you'd hear it again." "Turn the dial to the left, four notches." "You'd hear it again." "It was all over the place." "I was shaken up, a little scared." "I grew up listening to my influences... like your James Browns, your Sly and the Family Stones." "But to hear my own record like that, it was..." "I want my MTV!" "We were playing probably about the same percentage black videos as white videos." "The same number of black artists as white artists had produced videos." "Sorry, MTV, but I got to tell people this." "I'm in New York." "It's 1981." "I get a phone call." ""Don Letts, we want to interview you." ""You're the man who makes the Clash videos." Fine." "I go to MTV." "I show up in the offices." "Everyone's looking at me funny... like I should have used the tradesmen's entrance or something." "Somebody comes down, calls me into an office, sits me down, and says:" ""Don, you have to understand..." ""that we have a little problem here."" "What he was saying is he didn't realize I was black." "He went on to tell me that, at that time... the policy of MTV... was to cater to a Midwest white audience." "Therefore, they weren't really playing black videos." "He even gave me an example of how strict this rule was." "He cited Wordy Rappinghood... which was a cartoon with animation video." "But he said, "That sounds too black, so we don't play that."" "We could not get Billie Jean on MTV." "CBS threatened to pull their roster unless MTV started to play black artists." "I think the story that went around was Walter Yetnikoff... who was the legendary sort of... pound-the-tables head of CBS Records..." "I think what happened was Walter told Michael... that MTV didn't want to play that video." ""I went and told them, 'You play this video, or I'll burn you down."'" "With the big threats, and made himself look good to Michael." "When they started playing Michael Jackson's video... they considered that a great achievement." "But if you're black... you remember Michael Jackson from 1969." "So maybe it was a big turnaround for white America... but for black America, and for myself, I wasn't thrilled." "That was the beginning of music television, I think." "And it was Michael Jackson, Thriller, on MTV." "MTV and Michael rode each other to glory." "This is a rock 'n' roll museum." "You guys don't belong in here." "Somebody had to take the banner to the next level." "And it had to be a group that was willing to do something... that would be a milestone, not just another record." "When I saw Run-D.M. C..." "I said, "This is how it's supposed to be done."" "Those boys are def!" "They are def!" "We put the record out, Sucker MCs." "We did a lot of praying." "When we put this record out, Sucker MCs, nobody had a rap album out." "We just wanted our record to play... like some of the records on the big radio station." "MTV came along as everything was rolling right into place for us." "Everything was falling into place." "We couldn't stop it from falling into place after a while." "Then MTV, we got a call from Russell." "Something called MTV added us, it's really big to them." ""What's MTV?" Gather that together." " We didn't know MTV." " Didn't have cable in Hollis." "But they're very excited at the office... that we're gonna get regular rotation with Rock Box on MTV." "'"You don't understand how big this is. '" '"Okay, I'll tell D." "'"D., we got added on something called MTV." "They're very excited about this." "'"This is a big breakthrough. '"" "So we saw that they're happy, so it must be something big." "Raising Hell was big." "Everybody wanted to wear the black Levis and the black sweatshirt." "Everybody else thinks, besides rock 'n' roll..." ""Okay, it's time to go on stage." "Give me my wardrobe." ""I need my sparkles." "I gotta look good for the people."" "When people actually just want to see you in your jeans." "They want to relate with you." "Bruce Springsteen wears his jeans, and you go out on stage." "Walk around all day." "It's time to go on stage." "Keep walking up to the stage." "That's what they wanna see, so that's what we did." "We brought what we was in the alley rapping." "Time to do the show. '"Turn the camera on." "'"Let's do the same thing we were doing in the alley. '"" "They said, '"That's real, what I want. '" We did what we were doing." "We took the beat from the street and put it on the TV." "My favorite rap album of all time, hands down:" "Run-D.M.C., Raising Hell. 1986." "I remember I was in a record store, staring at this record." "I couldn't believe it." "I'd known the guys for three years, but I kept flipping it around." "I stayed in the store for an hour." "I said, "This is how rap's supposed to..." ""Rap is really bigtime." "This is how it's supposed to be."" "We were getting ready to make a rap record... over the beat Walk This Way." "Before rap records were made, we would rap over Toys in the Attic." "I was getting ready to rap over the first three seconds of the record." "With them loud guitars coming, I'm mad." "I'd lose 10 seconds at the start of the record." "If it ever got to him singing, there's a problem, I'm mad at the DJ." "Rick Rubin walked in and just took over." "'"Let's really make the record over." "Let's call these guys. '"" "Which weren't doing well at the time, '"Let's make Walk This Way over. '"" "Joe and I flew in, and there were these three guys... doing this thing called rap, which was relatively brand-new." "Rick said, '"Just kind of play along and get a bass. '"" "So I played bass on it, and it kind of built this track up." "They came in and rapped it." "They rapped whatever words they thought they were, which was cool." "He was mad at it for a while." "He was mad at the fact that, '"Oh, my God, the rap... '"" "Everybody was like, '"Run-D.M.C. Made y'all rap. '"" "For a while, they were a little hurt by it." "Everyone was saying that rap is just a fad." "As a matter of fact, hip-hop, the whole thing, is a fad... and it's gonna die soon." "People were saying, no way was rap gonna work." "Even though I didn't like it much at first, I knew then that it was gonna work." "A lot of rb artists back in the days used to say all kind of things." ""It's not music." Rock-'n'-roll artists, as well." "I don't think it's the highest form of music that you can make... because you're using someone else's melody." "I just took offense to that." "I said, "No, it's more than that."" "They still say things like, "It's not music." "It's garbage."" "Rap's short for "crap."" "Rap was computerized rot." ""If Hitler was to make a song, it would be rap."" "I first designed Public Enemy in the footsteps of Run-D.M. C... who I think, and still think, are the best rap group ever in rap music." "So I designed my group after them, and I said:" ""After studying Run-D.M.C., I can't go wrong."" "We recorded Criminal Minded." "That album was all about introducing the new style." "That's all it was about, the new style." "We are taking over the new style." "We came with a different ball game... of consciousness, self-knowledge..." "But also, on a musical end, we came with a faster tempo." "The biggest difference in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back... is that the beat range of a lot of rap records... were 98, 96 beats per minute." "And here I come with hip-hop, reggae... and 16-bar rhyme styles..." "Like, that's it, that's all, solo, single, no more, no less." "And at a time when people was going, "He's this, I'm that."" ""Throw your hands in the air, just clap."" "And our stuff was more like 109 beats per minute." "The kids was just going crazy for this style." "All right, all right!" " Who the hell are you?" " We're the band." "The band?" "Where's your instruments?" "What the..." "We only play rock music here!" "Yo, why you dissing, man?" " Rock 'n' roll!" " Yeah, dude." "Like, I think we're the band." "The first white rap that got across to me... was the Beastie Boys, because they came from the same environment." "Them guys, they were some bugged-out... gentlemen." "The Beastie Boys outraged audiences as the opening act for Madonna... on her 1985 Virgin tour." "In 1990, she outraged executives at MTV... who banned her Justify My Love video." "There are all sorts of artists... who are using music in a not-so-central way." "Something else is the center of what they're doing." "For example, the highly controversial Madonna." "People don't like her... because she seems to use music as part of the package for herself." "I say, "Why not?"" "If that's what she wants to do, why does music have to be the center of it?" "Why can't lifestyle be the center, and music be part of the presentation?" "I like Madonna." "But, for me, she went a little overboard... for me, my limit." "I felt like, after a while, she just wanted to shock people." "That's all she was interested in, shocking people." "All the people that have stood out, stood the test of time... are people that have had more than just their music." "When video came about and we saw the groups making videos... that were basically them bouncing around, we decided not to do anything like that." "The English have this uncanny knack of packaging... giving something a look, a style... and making it into more than just a sound." "I think much more so than the Americans." "So I wrote the actual script for the video ofSweet Dreams... as a kind of surrealistic, short, three-and-a-half minute film... largely influenced by Salvador Dalí's L'age d'or." "And the idea of a cow... coming and disturbing the reality of a boardroom meeting... or vice versa, a boardroom meeting being in the middle of a field of cows... to show the actual sort of uselessness and the stupidity... of people making decisions that think they're altering the world." "But in America, we speeded up a whole process." "We didn't go there and tour for years and years... 'cause MTV kind of did it for us." "I think it sped up the process." "It didn't replace road work." "At the time, I remember discussions with my buddies:" ""We don't have to tour anymore." "We'll just make a video."" "It certainly helps... to have your video played 20 times a day on TV." "The trouble with being a visual artist... is that the visual aspects of one's art... generally leave their marks more graphically... than the more musical form of what you do." "I originally disliked MTV quite a lot... because I thought it was a real safe play... and I still think it does play safe in many ways." "But I think that it's undeniably created a forum... for some of the most interesting film and video work... that's been done in the last 10 years." "It's like a lot of things today are forced on you... in your ears, in your eyes... whether you walk down the street with neon signs... music blaring in lifts, in restaurants." "A lot of the time, MTV can be like that." "It's just like wallpaper blaring at you." "But every now and then, there's a great filmmaker or great group... that has a great thing on, and it's worth it for that." "Video is the worst thing that ever happened to music." "It's taken a lot of magic out of music." "What the video age and MTVhas killed off... is this whole thing about how now a song is this visual." "The great thing, in the early days... was you could just sit there and hear these songs... and make up your own images and find your own things in it... and let your mind wander." "And artists that are not particularly over-talented... but because they look the part, become stars." "Fortunately, we came in before that started." "Would you get someone like me now... that doesn't look like a million dollars?" "No." "I don't think you would." "If they're on television all the time, you've taken some of the thrill of it out." "When I was a kid and David Bowie was playing at Lewisham Odeon... it was a big thing." "It was six months of waiting... and it was exciting." "Now you just turn on your TV." "It's like, "David Bowie." "Yeah." "KISS."" "I've seen things on MTV that have just made my eyes go like this." "They're shockingly original and fabulous things." "Some of the best video makers now... can do things in a four-minute pop video... that they would never, ever be able to do in any other forum." "I'm thinking, for instance, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers." "Rock 'n'roll is sexuality personified." "It's attitudes." "It's all the things your parents told you don't do, you can do." "It's the freedom to express yourself." "It's a good time." "It's being alive." "It expresses the times." "It's a way of..." "It's a magazine, newspaper that's the truth." "If you listen to rap today, it's all about the truth... which is all we all want, just give me a little bit of truth." "Middle America might be saying, "Not in my backyard."" "They would never see what was going on if it was up to them." "Out of sight, out of mind, seems like their credo." "As Americans across the country began to accept rap as a reputable form of music... the West Coast rappers joined in with an even harsher view of the inner city:" "Gangsta rap." "This is what this guy, this child has seen all of his life... but when you put a beat to it and put some rhythm... you say you don't want to hear it." "You understand me?" "But he's only telling you what he was raised around." "This is what is in his environment... and he's expressing it the only way he or she knows how to express it." "Well, you know, N.W.A., Niggers With Attitudes... when I heard their first album..." "Straight Outta Compton, I thought it was brilliant." "They said things outwardly... on tape, on a record, that people would only think." "Some things that you say and do... go a long way to influence those that listen." "And unfortunately, I feel, my opinion only... that it has only resulted in a lot of negativity... within the black community." "It's not negativity." "It's niggativity." "It's niggative." "And they represented it for the West Coast." "They actually single-handedly put the West Coast on the map." "Ice-T was doing it." "Ice-T was the forerunner." "He was like John the Baptist." "I created the crime line." "I was the first person to really rap about crime." "More than the attitude in '"gangsta rap... '"" "it's become a thing where a lot of the guys from the West Coast... where what's going on in the neighborhood... is blended with that particular type of music." "In sales... these guys go Platinum and Gold... like we breathe." "Rap is going in so many different directions now." "It's a versatile music." "A lot of white kids are learning a lot about black people... because of hip-hop, you know?" "We all get to learn about each other." "Hip-hop is like the CNN for the youth." "You don't start a band to save the world, you really don't." "You start a band for all the wrong reasons." "Just to make a big noise." "And roar at the world." "That's where it starts." "And later on in life, you develop a conscience." "When you begin to get real popular... you have to be careful that obviously there's not a dilution... into some very simplistic terms of what you're doing." "America's future rests in a thousand dreams inside your hearts." "It rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire:" "New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen." "Tonight in this city, there's people going hungry." "There's old folks whose social security checks don't get them through the month." "There's people who've been hit by unemployment." "People who the trickle-down theory of economics ain't trickling down to." "At the time, part of the idea was that I wanted the band to come out to be... a bit of an alternative voice... to the image of America... that was being presented by our Reagan administration." "In a way, the communication has affected so many things." "In music, and even the Berlin Wall, and perestroika and glasnost." "It's been very powerful, and people see what's going on." "The information between videos and films and music and everything else... when people absorb this, how powerful it is... the changes, it pulls the walls down." "And it wasn't Interpol or the CIA or anything else... that turned all this stuff around." "It was music, video, films, and information." "I think rock 'n'roll is very powerful." "It's a tool for bettering the world these days." "The conveyances that give us rock 'n' roll... are contributing more to the change in society than rock itself." "MTV, for instance, a channel which conveys rock 'n' roll to us... actually instigated a whole method of trying to involve youth... with changing politics and voting." "What's up?" "It's real popular in rap right now to diss the establishment... or complain about the establishment's faults." "What needs to be popular is getting y'all out there to vote." "Know what I'm saying?" "Trying to change the world with rock 'n' roll... is kind of a funny thought." "I don't think you can." "I don't think it has any power to change the world." "It only reconfirms or reaffirms to people where they're at." "One nice thing it does is brings people... that feel disenfranchised and lonely, together." "The whole idea that we could change the world musically... with good thoughts, positive energy, good vibrations... we could write songs that would make people love, not hate each other... we could put an end to war and violence by just positive thinking... was really a wonderfully innocent idea." "It didn't quite work, but it was a great idea." "To change the world, you must get out there and change it." "Music won't change it." "Music changes the way you live in the world." "It changes the way you see it, but it doesn't change the world itself." "I just remember Salt and myself in a studio at the time... and we were watching the news... and Magic Johnson just came through the TV:" "'"I'm HIV-positive. '"" "And we just sat there, fell, like, "Oh, my God!"" "And it just hit us." "And from that day on, it was like, "Oh, my God..."" "You know what I mean?" "A lot of people..." "That's home to us." "That's, like, close." "That's the circle we hang in." "That's young." "We need women to pick up women now, especially with all the..." "You know, how the guys diss the women... gangsta calling women hos and bitches and things like that." "We kind of counteract that with the things that we say." "Even political songs become pop songs after they're old." "It seems to be that self-consciousness... is what suffocates... the kind of creative spirit in anything... but especially in rock 'n' roll." "Look what you've done to me." "You've made me very famous, and I thank you." "I know you like your pop stars to be exciting... so I wore these." "Between stadiums, excessive indulgence... the growth of the media, the audiences, and record sales... rock 'n' roll became big business." "I think U2's popularity is founded on several things, actually." "One is that they write great songs." "Two is that they work extremely well as a band." "But I think most importantly... people sense that their commitment is real." "Not many things travel well around the world because of language." "The one thing that travels well is rock 'n'roll." "I remember in the Himalayas... up at Namche Bazaar, which is the last element of civilization... before you enter into Everest base camp area, Khumbu valley... it's up around 16,000 feet." "It is the highest point of any civilization." "This was the model for Shangri-La, that old, ancient movie." "I remember walking into a little box-room, like a warehouse area... where they stored rice and grain, there was a picture of Duran Duran." "In the last six years, I've been in 35 countries... many of them over and over again... on every single continent, in the name of rap." "People say, "Do they like rap in China?"" "I say, "What do you think I've been there for?"" "Like I went over there to play ping-pong, or some shit." "People thought it would probably spread east to the East Coast... maybe somewhere down south." "Did I think it was going to go to Australia, Africa..." "England, and Paris?" "I don't think so." "Hip-hop started here, you know, in one place... and it's all over the world now." "You got Japanese MCs... and all peoples from all nationalities, rhyming on the mike." "I've been to India and seen an Indian rap group... rapping about things happening in that village." "There are cultures in the world that are disappearing." "To some people, it's very important that they be preserved." "How does that fit in with a system... where in every country of the world now... people want to watch MTV and play rock 'n' roll?" "How are the young people gonna realize the value of their own music?" "What I'm excited about right now... is that rock 'n' roll, at this point, is mutating." "It's turning into something else." "In fact, the term "rock 'n' roll"... is over." "And I'm just excited to be at that point... where the ground is giving way." "I can really feel it just about to go under our feet, and I just want to let go." "You know, I want to go with it." "I think that's there's been a bit of a revolution... in popular rock 'n' roll in the last few years... with the success of Jane's Addiction and Nirvana breaking the ground." "And I think that people were just sick of listening to crap on the radio." "Bands left over from the '70s still putting out albums... and that's what the radio stations were eating up... and kids were like, '"This does not relate to me." "'"This is not my generation of music. '"" "And so radio stations picked up on it." "Lollapalooza picked up on it, and here we are." "I think what I look for in bands more than anything is attitude." "I think that America has a really good, thriving rock scene, you know." "People who have got something to say... something other than, you know... clichés." "The reason I chose Lollapalooza as the title for the concert... is because when I looked it up, this was the exact terminology:" "'"Something or someone great or wonderful. '"" "Two: "A giant-sized lollipop."" "It's like this alternative rock thing." "I don't know how many times I've heard that word thrown around, "alternative."" "It's, like, alternative to what?" "The media has really sucked up all of it." "It's the main genre of music... that's really popular right now." "When I think of alternative music..." "I think of just something different from what's happening in the mainstream." "This is about as mainstream as you can get." "Not that it's bad." "You have a kind of multicultural event... that's designed to open people's eyes up... to new sorts of music they wouldn't have heard before, and stuff." "This is great, and..." "I'm not sure if it's exactly happening that way... and I'm not really sure if this generation's eyes... particularly want to be opened up." "It's the only thing of its kind in the United States." "Kids just want to blow off some steam and come to the big rock show." "It is all about... bonding together in some way... and rebelling against the older generations... and everything around it." "But I just don't see where the rebellion actually is." "I might be a bit pessimistic, but I think that rock 'n' roll is dead now." "Rock 'n' roll is dead?" "What a silly statement." "Rock 'n' roll has now become a conformity... which is completely anti-nature to rock 'n' roll." "Therefore, it's dead." "Rock 'n'roll, when it starts calling itself rock and roll... that's when it has its problems." "When you have rock 'n'roll groups talking the same thing over and over." "When the music expands, that's when it tends to do better." "Same thing with rap." "A friend of mine who works in computers and high-tech industry... said that for him, he saw a 21st century... where people, to escape the high concept... and the agonizing realization... that we no longer understand or control our technology... would want to go home and touch something made of wood." "And I think that is kind of the place that rock is taking." "Things like grunge, for me, and Eric Clapton and rap... have a small, comfortable feel about them." "They are almost tribal." "They're things that you can touch." "They're made of wood." "You can't kill rock because it will always exist." "As soon as you assume it's dead, up pops Nirvana or some other thing." "They'll try and sell it... but the underground is always... ten steps ahead of the lawyers and accountants." "And so there will always be rock 'n' roll... or hip-hop or whatever underground music." "Now it's rock 'n' roll." "Now it's amazing to see black people do rock 'n' roll." ""You're black, and you have a rock 'n' roll group?" "Wow."" "That's what happens when the rebellion leaves the music." "It becomes Americanized." "I think that it's inevitable for music to become watered-down." "It's inevitable." "But the point of keeping it rebellious... is to keep people's awareness alive... as long as you can." "I've no idea what the future of rock 'n' roll is." "Nor am I really interested." "The future of rock 'n' roll:" "More surprises, both hideous and wonderful." "English"