Billy Bragg Quotes

When I was 20, political music was the uncoolest thing on earth.

The Beatles are a passing phase, symptoms of the confusion about us.

There's so much talk about the drug generation and songs about drugs. That's stupid. They aren't songs about drugs; they're about life.

For those that don't know much about 'American Idiot' or Green Day, just know that it's my generation's The Who's 'Tommy' or Pink Floyd's 'The Wall.' It was an album that really spoke to a generation. The theatrical show encapsulates that feeling and brings it to an even wider audience.

I was a little too young to be a hippie.

Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

Young people are told that they are standing up for Christ and resisting America's sexualized culture by claiming virginity as a countercultural, radical stance.

The attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition.

I had begun to abandon bourgeois style of dress. The modern hippies are no pioneers at marking themselves out by unusual apparel …

The day Obama got into office, rap was less important because Obama gave kids an alternative. But will rap ever go away? No. There will always be a need for poets.

One person who was interesting was Jello Biafra, who was - of all things - very professional!

In the music world, ageism is a big issue. It's about youth and youth culture. There's no other art form that I know that requires you to be a certain age.

I want people in their 20s to think of 'Swing' the way a generation in the 1960s thought of 'Esquire' - as the voice of young thinkers.

'Skins' has been such a great thing for our generation - I don't want it to become a parody of itself.

When I was 13, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground made more sense to me than anything else.

When I was a kid in the '50s, I was very enamored of beatniks and... a kind of dark sensibility.

In fact, many rock critics look askance at explicitly political lyrics, which I think is pretty stupid, without denying that some political lyrics are also pretty stupid.

I'm too old to be making dis songs.

When the punk rock thing happened, I thought, 'Right, I have one chance here to be seen as part of some wider social phenomenon.'

I am a politically motivated person, and that will come through in the music.

We have quite a few political songs: 'Channel Z,' let's 'Keep This Party Going' on. Our lyrics aren't too hit-you-over-the-head, but they have political undertones. We're active politically.

I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'