Joe Budden Quotes

I like the word 'underground'... 'independent' carries a stigma of whininess. 'Underground' means a good time.

I preferred rock when it was in the dark, when it was a secret between me and the audience, when it wasn't mainstream.

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

Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.

The world that I come from is the world of raves, hip-hop clubs, and rock and roll.

You gotta look beyond the mainstream... the mainstream'll drown you, you know? There's always a pulse in the underground that I love. And the pulse in the underground is what keeps heavy metal alive.

The alternative scene, for a couple years now, has been taken seriously and that's a cool thing. I don't think it's exploded or anything, but I think it's pretty cool that it still exists, it's still affecting people.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

I feel like I just wanna go back to being more underground.

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

Pirate radio is like street art.

I represent a kind of underground, punk side of drag.

I'm happy that grime remains underground. A lot of people talk like it's some underrated or ignored genre, but to me, that's the beauty of it.

The New Romantic scene was so tiny. Although it got lots of mileage in the media, it was a really small club with only a core group of people. As it got more popular, kids started to come from the suburbs all dressed up, but it -really wasn't as big as it looked.

The underground went really underground. Grand Funk, and all these people man are the moderate's choice of music. Underground is Yoko Ono, The Black Poets. These people scare the hell out of most freaks. They laugh at Yoko Ono, but it's the whole cliché.

A lot of punk rock. I listen to various stuff just cuz my friends now listen to a lot of different bands. I listen to a lot of underground stuff like jungle music.

1991 for some people was a significant year in terms of punk rock. It was the year "punk broke".

The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive.

When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

Underground hip-hop is, like, one of my foundations, I would say a cornerstone of my foundation of my musical tastes.

I think about Dischord. There's been a pretty consistent notion that Dischord have been some sort of "overlords" of the scene. Some people have felt 'they are too cool for us,' or 'they won't put this out,' etc. All we're doing is our own work, our own thing. That's all we've ever done. Our work.

I'm not a pop rapper. That's nothing against pop music - I love pop music. I've jumped on pop records for people and still will, but I'm not a pop artist. I didn't start from there. I started in underground music. I consider myself an underground artist, as well as a producer.

Punk and all that was just an image that ripped people off. Johnny Rotten's a wanker, and that's all there is to it.

Indie rock is just as susceptible - if not more susceptible - to all the gross things about people becoming total ass clowns in music, and only worrying about money and image. I'm not interested in being a part of that.

The punk scene in NY was so gritty and nihilistic & I was like ooh I want to do that