Keith Flint Quotes

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

I started out playing in clubs. I always like existing under ground and over ground at the same time.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can't afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I'm all for it.

Today, music is great for entertainment, but it is lacking soul; it's lacking substance, and it's difficult to find good stuff. There are too many corporate interests. It's not about the actual music because it's about the corporation, and music just becomes part of a package.

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

The mainstream is generally garbage. Look at the heavily subsidized theaters.

American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

Obviously, the Sixties was a time when everyone wanted to experiment, and then everything became very formulated and corporate, so artists tended to get pushed into a kind of pattern. Now, I think that has continued with the emergence of televised talent shows like 'X Factor.'

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

The broadcast networks - they are literally broad. They try to appeal to everyone. They try to reach all of America, all the time. Increasingly, they fail to do that, but they try.

Rock and roll has become entertainment that just says what the consumer wants to hear. There's no more edge or rebellion that sets it apart from the norm.

Oftentimes you'll see stuff that makes it into the mainstream that has been influenced by things that are clearly not from the mainstream.

It's a tough thing to know that when you're making your album, you're going to end up collaborating with, say, Wal-Mart, on your artwork. That just sucks. And the pressure behind getting the numbers real fast is, to me, dizzying.

The gallery is generating work for the masses.

The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics.

I think art maybe has just become very consumer-oriented, and maybe it's always been that way because it is a business.

'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.

There are thousands of great artists that wouldn't be doing the same kind of work if there were no music business machine. The ones who are popular would be doing much different work, too. Michael Bolton would be pumping gas.

I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.

I believe in cinema! Unfortunately, 90 per cent of Hindi cinema is non-cinema. Only marketing works here. Even the item songs in these films are an extension of marketing.

There's certain artists that are meant to have certain paths and go the way of the corporate world. And then there are artists who are artists.

Whether it's spending more time and money at thrift shops for threads (anti-consumerist threads, mind you), or combing the record store for the most unknown/least coherent band they can find, there's one thing that hipsters constantly want you to know: that they are better than you.