Michael Azerrad Quotes

No, I don't think rock 'n' roll will ever fade.

I feel like hip-hop is the new pop because it has a lot of influence because of our culture.

We have a great responsibility. Whatever we make will become the truth, the visual reality that a generation will accept.

It's rare when an artist's talent can touch an entire generation of people. It's even rarer when that same influence affects several generations. Elvis made an imprint on the world of pop music unequaled by any other single performer.

I don't know what you wanna describe as Rock 'n' Roll, but I certainly thought that 60s stuff, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, changed the world a little bit. But the effect seems to have retreated. I think it's harder than we think to change the world. These things go in cycles. It doesn't seem to have done an awful lot of good, does it? You know, all the talk of racial harmony and equality in the world... we haven't got a long way since the 60s.

The work of a generation is beginning here, with your hearings, and you have the full measure of my gratitude and support.

We come from a generation that wanted to make electronic music accepted, at a time [when] it was not.

The belief in the '70s was that music was changing the world. I never believed that it had that great an effect. The effect Madonna had on fashion and sort of mores of young girls was a bigger deal than anything Dylan may have said, even.

I can't predict what songs will do to the collective consciousness.

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

When alternative music - which is supposed to be the standard-bearer of where white rock is headed - becomes either too cute or too manufactured, that's just really not good.

Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts.

Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.

Rock music had become my religion. Radio my church. And these DJs my priests, rabbis and gurus.

When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn't want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people's lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.

When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.

My story has been the story of my generation.

What I want to do is basically tell my generation's story about how music and culture helped affect a generation, and a generation that's so profound, that it went on to elect the first African-American president.

Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music.

I really believe that Bob Dylan and others have speeded up the changes. Pacifism has found a voice at last.

Jesus is interested in changing cultures, not just putting bodies in chairs.

We are the generation that came of age in an ageless society.

Hip-hop is the fountain of youth. You just don't grow up if you were there. My son's 20. I'm on the same channel he's on. We wear the same clothes, we feel the same thing. It's a weird, weird generation we're in right now.

Sometimes to think about why some institutions are stable, it's interesting to go one generation back and look at the author of that stability.