Laura Jane Grace Quotes

I think what's happenin' is that, with the overflow of music, it's been diluted. There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio.

Culture is just a shambling zombie that repeats what it did in life; bits of it drop off, and it doesn't appear to notice.

People don't want to embrace culture shifts because it's not going to happen in the next 20 minutes.

Selling out isn't selling out anymore. It's getting the brass ring.

There are plenty of bands who never get in the charts and it doesn't mean that they're not any good. Actually, a lot of the top ten is filled with stuff that just sounds the same. I could guess what's in there now - probably a bit of GaGa, Beyonce and some U.S. R&B males.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

I love pop music. Who doesn't?

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.

Traditionally nerd-based culture is now a big sector of pop culture.

As big as Metallica are, they're still not like a pop act. As big as they are, they're still not U2 or Lady Gaga. It's still underground.

I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.

People have always been resistant to change. If you go back to the 17th, 18th century, playing guitar was frowned upon. When rock n' roll first started, no one took it seriously.

I still can't get over the idea that respectable adults now go to see superhero movies and that such films get reviewed in the 'New Yorker.' Clearly, I am seriously out of step with the times.

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar.... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. This form of stupidity is confined to no community, to no nation; it is universal. The fat is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas—but sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

My track record suggests that I'm not quite a mainstream darling, that's for sure. I don't want to only cater to a small audience, but it's just kind of worked out that way.

One has to create music with mass appeal and not something which is niche. With niche music, you will only go a small distance.

I'll put it to you like this: You can only go as mainstream as people will let you go.

Music became so commercialized that I just didn't want anything to do with it. I renounced the industry before it became the fashionable thing to do.

My whole goal in this industry nowadays is to keep doing the underground stuff, but to be able to add vocals that are sexy and underground.

We never said we were hard-core or that we didn't want our music crossing over or being popular.

'Push It,' to me, was very pop. And back then, you were called 'sell-out' to be pop.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

Those who have most at stake in the old culture, or are most rigid in their beliefs, try to summon people back to the old ideas.'