Irvine Welsh Quotes

Every band I've worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they've gone somewhere that nobody else has been.

I'm not Hollywood. I'm a Quarter Rat. I belong here.

Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall.

Everything's so commercialised it shuts down the underground.

New York's various undergrounds can make for a disciplined apprenticeship, and Gaga takes pride in her earliest fan base of art, fashion and music students.

The underground always has the best ideas. Sometimes those underground artists transcend and make it to the mainstream, but most of the time, the big guys just steal from us.

It is a different world, the underground. When you hit mainstream, you hit a saturation level and that turns some people off. When you are on more low-key stuff, it works to your advantage and it creates a buzz on the streets. At that point, the sky is the limit.

I don't think I'm mainstream. I think what I am is lots and lots of different cults. And when you get lots and lots of small groups who like you a lot, they add up to a big group without ever actually becoming mainstream.

As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.

Initially, electronic music was anti-establishment, as punk rock and rock n' roll were. The music was shut down; the police were against the parties.

I was once a student in a punk T-Shirt hooked on screwed-up scenarios. That's how I became the esteemed cultural figure that I am today.

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

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

The counterculture has nothing to do with Dolce & Gabbana having a 'Hippy Summer' or something. Street kids, and kids who want to live in any sort of counter-cultural experience other than what's being presented by the mainstream media or political climate, or 'normal' cultural climate, are never going to look like that.

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'm very underground.

For me, hipsterism is for one to appropriate the codes of a social class or another milieu that wasn't theirs originally, in order to define their personality through something different and unique. Which is why a lot of hipsters live downtown, and they're dressed as farmers. Then you have the Oscar Wilde hipster: the dandy.

When I started in the clubs, I had to work places where didn't nobody else want to work. I had to do clubs where street gangs were, had to do motorcycle gangs, gay balls and things of that nature.

The parts of graffiti I like are really antagonizing still - it's not something that a museum would really embrace.

I'm just not a big fan of the too-cool-for-school indie world. Metal bands have never been invited or been able to be part of the cool kids, and I like it that way.

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 thing about hip-hop is that it's from the underground, ideas from the underbelly, from people who have mostly been locked out, who have not been recognized.

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.

Pork was in 1971, and I stopped hanging out at The Factory by like 1973.

When someone asks you, 'What's punk?' my reply is, 'If you have to ask, you're never going to know.'