Ezra Furman Quotes

It's basically against the whole idea of what always made rock&roll music interesting to me. I thought it was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expressions of rebellion. It was one channel you could take without havin' to kiss ass, you know? And right now it just seems like they're on a big daisy chain, each kissin' each other's asses.

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.

I mean, the thing about Guns N' Roses was that it wasn't trying to attach itself to the '80s, or anything that had to do with the '80s. It's just who we were at that time. We were doing what we wanted to do. That had really nothing to do with anything around us, except for the simple fact that we were rebelling against that stuff.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is marketing. You've got a bunch of faceless people in a back room who trademark a name that sounds very official. Well, if you had thought of it first, you would have been the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The trouble is now, with rock'n'roll and stuff, it gets so big that it loses what once upon a time was a magnificent thing, where it was special and quite elusive and occasionally a little sinister and it had its own world nobody could get in.

I don't think there's any such thing as rock n' roll anymore - it's an amalgamation of business interests.

Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.

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.

Rock n' roll is a volatile thing; at least, it's supposed to be.

The song 'Bite the Thong' in particular, with Damon Albarn, really encapsulates the whole dilemma of, 'Hmm, should I stay on the underground when everybody else is selling out?' Nowadays, you can just do it - have your name-brand clothes, do songs with rock n' rollers - and it's not considered selling out.

When you start a rock n' roll band, you've gotta fake it till you make it. You begin by doin' what you love- and what you love is usually what some other people have already done. It just depends on how much of a fool you make of yourself along the way to finding your own sound, assuming you find it.

Anytime something makes money, no matter how outré, it's instantly mainstream. A good example is rock 'n' roll. When rock 'n' roll was first played to a wide audience it was considered the devil's music.

I am the Ayatollah of rock 'n' rolla

Hail, hail rock and roll / Deliver me from the days of old.

If you want to do rock and roll, forget about those who've come after '65.

Classic Van Halen made people want to dance and f**k. Modern Van Halen makes you want to drink milk and drive foreign cars.

This is serious business, sex, violence, and rock and roll.

Rock & roll is not so much a question of electric guitars as it is striped pants.

Every time you read something about Rolling Stones it always mentions their age and how long can they go on? I think there are certain genres of music where people are allowed to go on, but there is something about rock and roll, I guess because it originally started out to be a teenage rebellion.

The world is full of bands and bullshit, and if I'm doing a stupid art project like rock 'n' roll then I want to spare my audience as much as possible.

Rock 'n' roll is meant to entertain. Hippie folk singers are supposed to be singing about leftist views, but I don't think rock 'n' roll was ever that way. I don't remember the early rock 'n' rollers ever expressing any political views.

Even the indie rock world - which is supposed to be about truth and independence from corporate mindfulness or something - is totally subject to the paraphernalia of celebrity.

Scotty Moore plays one of the first really amazing riffs in rock history on Heartbreak Hotel with Elvis Presley ... it was dangerous, it scared everybodys parents, which was part of the attraction then - as it still is now... it totally blindsided me and made me want to get a guitar and do that.

Nashville may be famed for its country music, but this may well be the capital of rock and roll music in the United States of America.

I think the music industry, for instance, is such a huge, multibazillion-dollar industry and it's become very, very savvy. There's a very short grace period in which actual human rebellion or resistance can thrive before it's co-opted by these huge companies. And all of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.