Downtown Scene Quotes

Chicago is a wonderful, vibrant city with wonderful food cultures to it, wonderful talent downtown.

We were from downtown, so we were rapping in Danceteria, in these white downtown clubs, really. Nobody downtown was rapping. Nobody we knew was rapping. So we were like, 'We should do it.' We weren't making fun of it; we loved it, and we wanted to be part of it.

Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.

When I was little I wanted to be like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love or be attached to the X-girls and hang out in downtown culture.

As for my identity within the context of New York nightlife? I left in the '90s, so I'm not part of the scene anymore. I'll always be interested in what's happening downtown, and I try and keep up with the changing faces on social media.

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

I don't know why people always compare me [ with Amiri Baraka] I was never part of the Black Arts Repertory Theater or the Black Arts Movement; people who claim that I was are wrong. I was downtown. I was living in Chelsea when they were operating in Harlem.