Or In Other Words: Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom

"It's one thing to demand technical excellence if you're Duke Ellington or Charles Mingus ... but I get so tired of repeating to bigoted jackasses year after year it has nothing whatsoever to do with rock 'n' roll ... Everybody, damn near, who's worth a shit gets subjected to this sooner or later (if they're lucky it's sooner and folks wise up later, or later, or later yet.) It happened to Bird, Ornette, Coltrane, Miles, Cecil Taylor, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, Jim Morrison, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Dolls, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, Patti Smith Group, Suicide, MC5 and the Faces in my lifetime."
- Lester Bangs, from untitled notes (collected in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung)


"(Matthew Johnson, head of Fat Possum Records) seems be looking for the anti-Whitmanesque strain of the American voice - the naysayers, the verbal bomb throwers, the primal screamers. His heroes are the anti-heroes: Jerry Lee Lewis, Ike Turner, Keith Richards, Axl Rose, Cobain, Eminem, plus the blue-collar heroes Lynyrd Skynyrd and Kid Rock. Genre be damned - in his mind, these are the true descendants of the lonely, libidinous, and eternally damned Robert Johnson."
- Jay McInerney, from White Man at the Door (collected in the Da Capo book)