Lou Barlow Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

All the serious bands, all the punks, came from Bristol.

I loved all that riot-grrl scene and Nation of Ulysses and Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear. I loved it. It was the moment sort of first growing up where bands had stopped looking like roadies.

When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.

A lot of people think that punk rock musicians don't know what they're doing.

If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

I love punk rock, but I also love metal.

Minor Threat was an important band, believe me that it was important it in my life, but it belongs to an era that no longer exists. I'm not nostalgic. I think music today is much more important, because something can be done about it.

When I got into all the grunge stuff, I really liked Hole. I actually saw them in concert when I was a sophomore in high school. It was kind of rare to see a successful female rocker get down and dirty with the guys. And Courtney Love did. It was fun to be a fan of something different.

We were watching bands like the Ramones and Blondie and other bands beginning to ignite.

I'm a punk rocker. I don't do Christian.

When Soundgarden formed, we were post-punk - pretty quirky.

Punk is not really a style of music. It was more like a state of mind.

After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band.

Where there is young people and vitality, you're going to find punk rock.

One overlooked great 1980s rock n' roll band, maybe punk rock - they were on SST Records, same label as Black Flag - is this band called the Leaving Trains.

The movie 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' was a sacred text in my household.

When The Fall pummeled their way into my nervous system, circa 1983, it was as if a world that was familiar - and which I had thought too familiar, too quotidian to feature in rock - had returned, expressionistically transfigured, permanently altered.

If I opened a record store, it wouldn't be all punk rock and esoterica.

Even from the very beginning, the type of fans the Ramones generated were the kind of people who wound up running industry, who became professors and scientists. Our staunchest fans were always a little bit more on the outside, the type of people who didn't fit in with society.

Playing in London in 1979 was exciting: it was at the start of new wave, the transition period after punk, and there were a lot of radical, fashionable young people on the streets and in the venues.

I was a big fan of the Rain Parade, Green on Red, X, the Rolling Stones.