Alternative Culture Quotes

What I've become good at is bringing things that aren't necessarily mainstream to the mainstream.

I'm going to do everything I can to keep from being mainstream.

Glam really did plant seeds for a new identity. I think a lot of kids needed that - that sense of reinvention. Kids learned that however crazy you may think it is, there is a place for what you want to do and who you want to be.

To a degree, rock fans like to live vicariously and they like that, music fans in general, but when indie music sort of came into prominence in the early '90s, a lot of it was TV-driven, too, where if you saw the first Nirvana video, you're looking at three guys that look like people you go to school with.

If you're trying to get to the underworld of Berlin, it's not suits and ties; it's rock and roll.

I started going to Madame Louise's, the lesbian club where all the punk bands used to go - the Sex Pistols, the Clash. I remember seeing Billy Idol walk in there; he was gorgeous.

These people, as far as I can see, do not congregate in the notorious centers of the movement, like the North Beach in San Francisco or Greenwich Village, or Venice, California.

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.

From the time I was a kid, I'd never joined groups. I hated high school groups. I hung out with hippies, musical people. I hung out with whomever I found compelling and interesting and smart. And I continued to do that throughout my life.

Give metal a chance!

I used to be into the Grateful Dead, so I understand the Phish thing.

A cult classic is one that has been fully embraced by an alternative audience, not the popular audience.

(Punk rock is) lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.

Naturally, underground music often gravitates toward experimentation and the abstract. That's understandable, and more often than not, it feels great to dive into a difficult album and swim a few laps.

My favorite drag queens are Tammie Brown and Katya, so I like my drag queens a little left of sanity.

We put on shows at Golden Gate Park with the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, and the groups were part of the community they emerged out of, not some superstars. We had multiple stages, diversions, communal entertainment. There is something slightly fascistic about sitting in a huge auditorium focusing all the energy on one group far away on stage.

We have always appealed to people outside of the mainstream. Constantly, we get people coming up to us and saying, 'I was just the freakiest one in high school. I was the only one who kept playing the B-52's.'

Where I grew up, there was only one CD shop, and I didn't really like school, so we'd register, then bunk off, and we would be round my mate's house making drum-and-bass mix tapes.

When we played Paris, the English punks would come over, and they got to know the French punks. There was some nice scenes in the back alleys.

I didn't really want to be in the lifestyle without the music. And I didn't want to be in the music without the lifestyle.

When I got out of college in 1991, I had four jobs in four different parts of L.A. There was I Love Juicy, a smoothie bar in Venice, and the Videotheque on Sunset Boulevard, across from the old Tower Records. I was also an intern at the 'Los Angeles Reader' in the Miracle Mile and at 'High Performance' magazine downtown.

I've always seen My Chemical Romance as the band that would have represented who me and my friends were in high school, and the band that we didn't have to represent us - the kids that wore black - back then.

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

I think people are enticed by indie rap and every time you have a group going against the grain, they're gonna be like, 'Wow, you did it yourself in 2012, that's impressive - how did you do it? What're you doing that's different? And how can I be a part of it?'

For every reader and writer of steampunk fiction, there are probably hundreds or thousands of other activists who gleefully embrace some non-written manifestation of the steampunk ethos.