Greil Marcus Quotes

I was real into Devo, Pavement, Captain Beefheart, and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

I started making music with my band in the '80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.

Bands such as LiLiPUT and Essential Logic were just as unorthodox as Gang of Four or Wire, even taking their sounds a step further with shrieking vocals and saxophone.

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music.

I picked up the bass kind of postpunk-style. There's a real art to not learning how to play an instrument and being able to still play it.

I've been into Sonic Youth since junior high school. I think I kind of have ADD, so it's good music for ADD because it just throws you in different directions all the time. I really like Kim Gordon's voice and Thurston Moore's voice, and I like the guitars going off on tangents.

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things.

I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

We were like psychedelic folk combined with Sonic Youth's noise.

I love punk, I love a lot of British Invasion bands, I love garage bands.

If it's me and yer granny on bongos, it's the Fall.

Things that excite me are these four different bands: Wire, with a song called 'Champs,' Misfits, with a song called 'Hybrid Moments,' R. Stevie Moore, and Wipers 'Wait A Minute.'

When Talking Heads started, we called ourselves Thinking Man's Dance Music.

At the time, 'Oxygene' was considered a totally 'far out' concept... What was 'in' at the time was disco, hard-rock, and the early days of punk... and moreover, 'Oxygene' was instrumental. And I was French!

In high school, I listened to The Jam, stuff like that, a lot of English bands, really. And then I got into anarcho-punk bands that nobody had heard of.

It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.

I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s.

I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it.

One of the most prevalent and undermentioned genres of music is what is known as noise. You can find it all over the world happening in basements, small venues and even some festivals. Often blown off or belittled by critics, the form for the most part goes unheard and unnoticed.

To some degree, yeah, because I have to play a certain number of originals that might be considered avant-garde material. I realize though, that only a few people in the audience actually know what that music is, or understand it.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

When I was in college in Philly, there was a lot of post-punks... hardcore... like, rock. Sixties, retro, proto-Strokes kind of bands.

I'm amazed at how adventurous and how dangerous the music was, and still is. I haven't heard anything like it since. I'm quite surprised, because a lot of the music on there we never heard at the time.

When I was little, people like Talking Heads were on the radio. There was something geeky yet groundbreaking about them.

I knew that I tend to always gravitate to the indie side of things.