Independent Scene Quotes

I've always been singing all my life, but I started playing guitar when I was 19, and that was my final year in university, in law school. I think that happened when I started making a lot of friends who were in the independent music scene.

If there's any profit to be had in Nashville-Underground, it's very long term. We're not about money, which gives us an edge over the labels.

In the beginning, it wasn't even a question of deciding I'm going to do independent film and not commercial films - I wasn't being offered any commercial films, and there wasn't an independent scene.

If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.

I've seen what you can do in this grassroots, do-it-yourself world, and I've seen how far that can get you. To be iconic, you still need the gatekeepers to open the doors.

The indie world changed when the economy went south. I was frustrated with doing something, then waiting for it to come out, and sometimes it never did, or would just play in New York for 50 people. So I really wanted to try something else.

I've known Kyle O'Reilly since 2009. Me and him actually met each other when we had our very first match against each other for Gabe Sapolsyky's DragonGate USA show. Me and Kyle went in there and we had a match that kind of made waves throughout the independent scene as far as us getting our names out there. We both got signed to Ring of Honor at the exact same time.

Definitely, when you get into something where bands are playing for 30,000 people, it's not like the post-punk, U.S. independent scene.

I came from the independent scene, and I've wrestled in front of a crowd of four people in a car lot in 104 degrees in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

I was in the independent scene for two years before I got the call from the WWE.

Was I a fan of WWE? Yeah, of course, but I knew it was not going to be a thing for me, until NXT came to the foreground and a lot of my friends who I was competing against on the independent scene were getting signed.

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

I lived in Calgary, and a lot of old WWE, WWF and WCW guys went through Calgary - whether to train or to work on the independent scene. When I lived there, I became immersed in all of this wrestling talk and it sparked my curiosity.

We value the independent wrestling scene, and it's our goal to strengthen it.

In the wrestling world, you had WWE, WCW, and smaller promotions that were like the independents. I look at it as craft beer being the independent beer makers. It's the indie scene.

It's nice that the independent scene is taken seriously, and has been.

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.

Most people know that Lita has been, as far as my wrestling career is concerned, a big influence even before I came to the WWE. We met when I was working the independent scene in North Carolina. She's always been so kind to me and helped me out a lot.

I was having a lot of mixed feelings about the independent world as well as the label world. I feel like I've been in the game a long time, and you know, when it come to labels not seeing a fella being around the last five years, it's like, it's hard to convince them what I can do.

I think - for female or male, it is very challenging on the independent scene.

My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.

I don't want to retire on the independent scene. I don't want my legacy to be remembered as that.

The emergence of the independent hip-hop scene has replaced what we called the "underground scene". It's what the underground scene has evolved into: actual businesses.