Michael Stipe Quotes

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.

So, we just kind of created our own thing and that's part of the beauty of Athens: is that it's so off the map and there's no way you could ever be the East Village or an L.A. scene or a San Francisco scene, that it just became its own thing.

I never identified with 'indie,' I don't like that word.

I'm a proud mainstream musician, but having said that, I do firmly believe there's more to musical talent in India than just Bollywood.

There are always young bands playing in their garages. A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.

I knew that I tend to always gravitate to the indie side of things.

We're from Athens, Alabama. That's my town. People think it's Muscle Shoals, but they have no idea. It's a quiet, sleepy little town, about 45 minutes from Muscle Shoals. It's really hard to be a band in Athens; there are no venues.

There wasn't a lot of live music that you could hear where I came from, which was a small town in southeast Missouri.

We've been allowed to operate unmolested on the fringes of the music scene, really. That's where we enjoy it most.

All the serious bands, all the punks, came from Bristol.

When we started out in the U.K., there were songs that we made, we put them on the Internet, and we immediately started touring the U.K. We borrowed our friend's mum's car, and drove ourselves around for, like, a year playing gigs in pubs and tiny little venues. In that respect, we're pretty grass roots as a band. We've done all that together.

King Khan and the Shrines may look and sound bizarre, but don't feel left out; it's not an exclusive club.

I got into Nirvana, and it was my sort of awakening into the idea that music could be like rough and crazy and local. And so I started to realize that there were bands playing in my town, Anacortes.

The Indian music scene is completely dominated by Bollywood music. We need to create space for indi-pop music.

Bath was hardly known for its rock'n roll. We weren't part of the London scene or the New Romantics or any of that.

When I came up in a band - not just in a band, but a kind of underground DIY community - there was such a clear cut distinction between what pop was and what not pop was in very simplistic terms.

Punk helped musical fringes get attention. Stuff like Nirvana could never have happened without it.

We're not really an underground band anymore, and we're not a mainstream band, either.

Back in 1981, the chances of a punk-rock girl band from L.A. doing what we did was completely nil.

Punk-rock records came out and you bought whatever you could find. But Devo didn't happen for another three years. Sex Pistols didn't tour the States until '78. At that time, for me, it was really about CBGB, Patti Smith, Talking Heads, the Ramones, and Television.

Punk-rock gave music back to people. For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16 and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.

The American underground punk scene, though, is a story worth remembering.

We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard... Everything was 10th-generation Led Zeppelin... Overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be.

I'm kind of proud of that little record! I mean I've heard about a million other records that have come out since then by all these groups around here and there and I really like 'Little Johnny Jewel'.

The best music out there isn't on the radio.