Mike Watt Quotes

If you go to Hollywood, you've already sold out.

People have always asked me, 'Haven't you wanted to sell out?', and it's like, who am I going to sell to?

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.

Well, the stuff that has become more commercial doesn't have any edge.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.

'S.N.L.' has become what it was always trying to make fun of. It's become this big machine. I don't want to be plugged into a machine.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

I really don't believe in the word 'selling out.'

People who love jazz musicians love us when we play what we want to play and we're starving. But as soon as you commercialize your sound like Wes Montgomery did, the jazz fans and the critics are down on you!

When no one's buying your records, it's easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can't really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

I don't want to sell my soul to Hollywood - to just make run-of-the-mill stuff.

I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

I've never worried about how a new release will be received. I simply try to do the best I can and leave the rest to the gods. The music industry in those terms is something I loathe and detest. It conjures up images of a gigantic factory spewing out parts of the machine.

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.

Selling out isn't selling out anymore. It's getting the brass ring.

The music industry can make you feel like a prostitute.

It's totally produced now. It's almost like a conveyor belt of what metal's supposed to be like these days. It's not music to me.

There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.

The biggest difference between me and other artists out there is that they'll put anything out to sell a record or sell a ticket.

My whole life I've played music for my own personal enjoyment and the idea of it becoming a machine or a business is just horrible.