John Hughes Quotes

I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me.

I was like little-miss wannabe punk-rocker; I would go home and secretly listen to Pink, and dance around, like, 'Ugh, she understands me so well!'

I always viewed myself as kind of hip-hop's outcast, or hip-hop's stepson.

I'm always connecting with what society would label the outcasts and the weirdos and the lost souls.

We have always appealed to people outside of the mainstream. Constantly, we get people coming up to us and saying, 'I was just the freakiest one in high school. I was the only one who kept playing the B-52's.'

I like V-Nasty a lot, and I know anytime I like an artist and the majority of people really don't like her, I know it's something special. That's the same way I felt about Gucci.

Evanescence fans aren't the popular kids in school. They aren't the cheerleaders. It's the art kids and the nerds and the kids who grow up to be the most interesting creative people.

Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool.

I wasn't shy, but I was really hyper. Nobody got my sense of humor. I was a black skater kid.

I always thought that there was something in hip-hop culture that was the misfit of all the musical styles, where they didn't really belong. They're kind of like, 'No, we're a real culture! We're not going anywhere, you can't get rid of us!' I really liked that there was a rebelliousness about it. I connected with that.

Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.

Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.

I've always straddled a weird line - there's a lot of mainstream stuff that I love. At the same, I still feel like an outsider. I'm the outsider who's on the inside.

Good fashion is like rock music: all anarchy and revolt.

That's what drew me to rock music in the first place - that sense of remaking the world on your own terms.

To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early '90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you're looking at three guys that look like people you go to school with.

To be the outsider is actually a great thing in England.

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.

Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo.

When I heard 'Dookie' by Green Day for the first time, it unlocked something in me, like, it's totally okay that I'm a little bit weird because these guys are a little bit weird. It made me want to pick up an instrument and do that.

I like 'My So-Called Life' and the 'Riot Grrl Movement' and 'Freaks and Geeks.'

A lot of people get into alternative music as part of their identity. It's something that isn't the mainstream, that their brothers and sisters don't know about, and that their parents don't like. It's something they can have as their own.

I've always been weird, and into weird stuff that has a hard time finding mainstream success.

I think I gravitate towards characters who are slight outsiders.

For us, punk rock and even hardcore music was something we did because we didn't fit in in high school. We had nowhere to go, so we went to shows.