Jello Biafra Quotes

So many things for me are unfortunate in the commercialization of something that is special. It's like when Led Zeppelin appears in Cadillac commercials. There's something that is taken away from your love of this thing and your connection to it.

I won’t sell my songs for no TV Ad.

I have decided long ago that my songs and ballads would not get the hugs and kisses of the capitalistic experts.

Hip-hop don't have no fresh energy, none at all. It's money driven, everybody tryin' to make that cheque, nobody putting art in their albums any more.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, 'Well, you can do that, but you've got to remove this aspect of your work.' There would no longer be that purity anymore.

Too often, you see film makers from other countries who have made interesting, original films, and then they come here and get homogenized into being hack Hollywood directors. I don't want to fall into that.

If you are too overwhelmed, then when you sit down and try to write something, it feels forced. There's nothing worse than forced music. I mean, this world has enough of that right now, where it's basically McDonald's making music. 'Everybody needs another hamburger and fries.' Here's a piece of crap that nobody's gonna care about it two years.

When the business starts shaping the art, or the delivery of the art, then it's not right.

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

'Shall We Dance?' takes a small, exquisite Japanese movie and turns it into a big, stupid American movie. Still, it must be said that as glossy and overproduced as the thing is, it's a good big, stupid American movie.

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.

Broadway purists may deplore the influx of movie-spinoff musicals in recent years, wishing someone would turn off the popcorn machine and let more imaginative brainstorms blow through.

Imitation is being rewarded. They're learning that if you fit right in the mold, you get rewarded. Music is no longer a form of expression - it's a means to a lifestyle.

It's really weird how the rock world is quickly becoming like the jazz world. How if you do OK, or get a tiny bit of success, that's considered a sellout, whether you did anything different or not.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and you like what you like. But I felt like with 'Pride,' certainly when it was released in America, there were certain things that went on with the marketing where I though we're pandering to whatever the vibe is of that area.

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.

Becoming a commercial scene? I don't think people in grime would be happy about that.

When 'Jelly's' went out on tour, no one really wanted it. It was undersold. And I knew if I gave 'Noise' to someone else, they would sell it as 'Stomp' with little dancing black boys.

With country, it's hard to penetrate the thick layers of commercialism that have been applied like shellac coatings over the real thing.

Corporations have steered the industry into what it wants, and a lot of times they will make artists record what it wants or to make songs talk to who they want to talk to. But sometimes the heart and the head have to be able to talk and deal with a situation that's evident.

There's bad in everything. I dislike people misusing something that I love so much. It goes beyond the money. It goes beyond all of that and the glory. I love what I've done and I just can't stand to see what they're doing to it. But I've learned to live with it because that's what they've done. They've come in with the modern sounds. I call it modern pop. It's not country anymore.

For me, singing was always about the lyrics. I'm hopeless at singing songs that don't have a core.

I think that selling rights is a bad move commercially, not just morally. It cheapens the songs. When people come to my concerts, they often hold up candles when we do "Let It Be." I don't think they'd do that anymore if the song suddenly became part of an Oldsmobile ad.

Rich kids who write songs about food stamps always piss me off. I'm not going to write any songs about that, either.