Countercultural Movement Quotes

The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.

Rock and Roll is simply an attitude. You don't have to play the greatest guitar.

Rock n' roll is about attitude and rebellion. It's supposed to be fun and spontaneous.

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together.

I did go through a Goth thing, but that was a long time ago. I just like artists that shake it up, that piss people off or make people think or rattle the cage somehow.

I think that music is a very, very powerful thing, especially when you have a movement like this [CBGB club] to shed new light on music and the power of it.

That force - which the system tried to laugh at - when it finally broke through and the movement was recognized, the media said they were "just a bunch of spoiled kids, dope smokers [who] don't know what the hell they want." To demean it as something laughable - but that didn't work for very long. It's still an ongoing struggle; they're trying to find out how to fight. It's very exciting times.

The free, creative, loving people who shine so brightly in my memory of studios and coffee shops have become models for a huge section of the population. If they in turn can just stay alive in the face of power and terror, they may become the decisive section.

The New Romantic scene was so tiny. Although it got lots of mileage in the media, it was a really small club with only a core group of people. As it got more popular, kids started to come from the suburbs all dressed up, but it -really wasn't as big as it looked.

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.

In our deepest places, we all wish we could live like Raoul Duke for a while.

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

What I'm nostalgic for is the idea of an edge in New York. There used to be these fringes of the city where civilization sort of ended, and therefore young people could live cheaply, or open nightclubs or art galleries, or even squat. That fringe moved out to New Jersey and Brooklyn. The whole idea of the metropolis is the centralization of like-minded souls, and when the central real estate becomes too expensive, the dreamers, the young poets, and the artists will go elsewhere.

Street culture is punk, hip-hop, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti. It's like a massive global culture that is all tied together. But for so many years it was very geographic.

The popularity of punk rock was, in effect, due to the fact that it made ugliness beautiful.

From the beginning, there was so much pressure in the early San Francisco punk scene for everyone to be different than everyone else, to flaunt your intelligence and insights instead of every band sounding alike, like what plagues punk music in particular today.

Essential to the self-image of conservatives is the notion that they are enemies of an established orthodoxy, insurgents against the dogmatic political correctness that predominates on the Left.

I never did know exactly what was meant by the term "The Beats," but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen Ginsberg, myself, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory Corso, for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years.

We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage. Jesus and the early Christians had a marvelous political imagination. They turned all the presumptions and ideas of power and blessing upside down.

The underground scene is still a cool way to meet a lot of cool people, see a lot of interesting bands and get a lot of food for thought, but people have to remain curious and get their brain activity food from other places besides punk.

I am not the Jesus of the official church tolerated by those in power. I am not your superstar.

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

There were two practical reasons we moved to Venice. One was that there was an artists movement and a countercultural movement. Lots of people we might want to hire lived in the area. We also wanted to buy in a lower rent area that looked like it was going to be gentrified so that we could eventually sell the studio for more money.

I'm a real conservative. I never became a hippie, or a groupie. I never wore flowers in my hair.