Michael Azerrad · 522 pages
Rating: (11.4K votes)
“Rock'n'roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages--they could be 15, 25 or 35. It all boils down to whether they've got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit... -Calvin Johnson”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Los Angeles wasn’t a sun-splashed utopia anymore—it was an alienated, smog-choked sprawl rife with racial and class tensions, recession, and stifling boredom.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“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.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“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 weren’t for those type of bands we never would have had the nerve to be a band. But I guess you need bad things to make good things. It’s like with farming—if you want to grow a good crop, you need a lot of manure.”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“I’m not religious about God,” Boon agreed, “I’m religious about Man.” “We believe in average guys,” said Watt. “What happens is, the system makes them all fuckheads.” “And I want to try to snap them out of that,” said Boon. “That’s why I write these songs, OK?”
― Michael Azerrad, quote from Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991
“Concerning this a man once said:Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables
you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“as he had? An abby streaked into the clearing. Then another. And another. A fourth. Fifth. No more. Please. No—A group of five joined the others. Then ten more. Soon there were twenty-five of them milling around the boulders in the shadow of that cliff. His heart fell. He crawled back”
― Blake Crouch, quote from Wayward
“In a touch Buckland would have appreciated, this multipronged dispersal from Africa is sometimes called the Weak Garden of Eden theory. But this tale is actually better than the biblical version; we didn’t lose Eden but learned to make other Edens across the world.”
― Sam Kean, quote from The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code
“This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the earth to run into the sun, so there’s no immediate cause for worry!”
― Stephen Hawking, quote from A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes
“As much as I love teamwork, for this game, you all need to fly solo, like Han in Star Wars, although he always had Chewbacca in the copilot seat. But that is neither here nor there, because it is in a galaxy far, far away. Play on, Olympians.”
― Chris Grabenstein, quote from Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics
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