Rick Famuyiwa Quotes

Dress codes and gestures and attitudes have always inspired me, as has youth culture in general, although now I question it more. If you analyze youth cultures over history, there has always been something strict about them - you have to be like this or like that.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

I was a snot-nosed teenage skater at one point, who listened to only punk records and hung around people that had that idea of what is okay to do and what isn't okay to do.

I have always been mainstream. It's so weird, because I don't see it as something negative at all. So many people see it as something negative.

When I was twelve or thirteen, if you liked something that was outside of your friend group genre, you had to rationalize and explain it in some way. It's totally irrelevant, I think, now. I don't think anybody cares. Not young people, at least. Maybe journalists.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

We are in love with youth culture in this country... It permeates every aspect of people's lives.

In Japan, Australia, and England there is such a strong youth culture.

I've always balked at anything that feels like a clique, even if it's not always in my best interest to do so. I like each individual, fedora-wearing hipster - it's just the greater gestalt that rubs me the wrong way.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll.

I never understood why the metal heads in my school hated the punks.

I was growing up in the New Wave period, but that wasn't allowed in school. I remember moments when they wouldn't let four people dressed in black stand together on the playground.

It is hard to be an individual in Japan.

Young people in my generation were sort of in lockstep, and it wasn't just the '40s, either. In the '30s and in the '50s it was the same. No one ever dropped out unless he got sick or got kicked out.

Teens in the '90s had the same basic desires as they do now.

My biggest crisis is that I don't understand what young people like.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either.

People think that young people don't care about things, but I think they do care; they just aren't super interested in conforming to what older people think are the right way to do things.

I had to ask my grandchildren, 'What does it mean? I threw shade?'

I just have a problem with youth culture.

When you're younger, it's all about conformity and being easily influenced - especially in terms of fashion. You just follow the trends. Whatever is hot at the moment, you want to get it. You basically just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. But as you get older, those things aren't as important.

I'm mainstream.

When I was a boy, I was sagging my pants like everyone else. Some boys become men and continue to sag their pants because that's their form of rebellion.