“I had two kinds of letters that were very encouraging. The first kind of letter was from sixty-year-old housewives saying: ‘Jesus, you know, it really isn’t all that noise I thought it was. Thank you for introducing it to me, and Simon and Garfunkel and other pleasing things.’ And the letters from young people saying: ‘My God, I can’t believe it. I never thought anyone would understand. Wow, too much!’”
- Ralph Gleason, “Two Critics – Gleason and Marcus,” 1973 (publication unknown)

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“Indeed, the professional dignity of far too many rock writers is undermined by the knowledge that they’re not serving a defined readership or building a coherent body of work. Apart from realizing, in a vague sense, that the audience is young and intellectually disengaged, no one in the field seems to know who they’re actually writing for.”
- Gavin McNett, Feed, 1998 (?) (response to Jo-Jo Dancer’s “Rock Critical List”)

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PSF: Many times during then, you’d abandon conventional reviews and go into personal narratives.  Did you ever worry that it was something of a disservice to the reader to do this?
RM: I felt it was a GIFT to the reader.  At all times, I was ADDRESSING the reader.  I wanted to help readers pull the ring from out of their nose and realize…  Burroughs is always talking about Hassan I Sabbah, who said “Nothing is written, all is permitted.”  That’s really what I was telling readers, that you do not have to accept the hand as dealt.
- Richard Meltzer, Perfect Sound Forever interview, 2000

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“In the Voice, I want to piss people off. Especially in the Voice. Since I started writing for that paper, I’ve always assumed that there’s something complacent about those readers. So yeah, I want to shock them. Besides, it’s interesting to talk about Venom in terms that somebody who reads the Voice might appreciate.”
- Chuck Eddy, Nerve interview, 1986

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“The worst kind of censorship is self-censorship. At Rolling Stone, it was very rare that Jann Wenner would actually pull something from the magazine and replace it with a positive review — it happened to happen to me, but that’s fairly rare. Far more insidious is the writer knowing, I am going to get more work if I make my editor happy, if I make the publicist happy, if I make the artist happy, the record company happy — they have this long list of people who they’re writing for. And at the very bottom of that list, if they even make it at all, is the reader.”
- Jim DeRogatis,  rockcritics.com interview, 2002

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“The source of the most harrowing, confessional feedback I get is that I do write about myself, and my own fears and hopes and epiphanies, in the course of writing about the music. Some weeks I’m much more of a diarist than a reviewer or a critic, and I think for people who want their lives and their music to mean something, my struggles sometimes resonate.”
- Glenn McDonald, rockcritics.com interview, 2001

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“When Carola met me, she was impressed by how often I got into confrontations with people on the street.”
- Robert Christgau, Salon interview, 2001

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“The [Creem] letters was always my favorite section, I wish I could tell you that we made them up, but we didn’t have to. I always was amazed how much sicker our readers were than we were.”
- Jaan Uhelszki, rockcritics.com interview, 2002

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“At the New Music Seminar one year, when I was wearing a name tag, someone came up to me and said, ‘So you’re Jon Pareles. I never agree with anything you write.’ I shook his hand and was happy to meet him. For that guy, I’m a completely reliable critic; all he had to do was take the opposite of my advice. That’s fine with me. But I’d rather have my record collection than his.”
- Jon Pareles, rockcritics.com interview, 2001

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“[Gloria] loved her readers, the young kids from small towns who were fighting the torments of puberty with 16 as their imagination’s guide and — thanks to her advice column, among other things — their lifeline.”
- Dave Marsh, obituary for Gloria Stavers, Rolling Stone, 1983

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“But frankly I don’t always know how much respect I have for the audience either – sometimes I wonder if they’re not getting exactly what they deserve. What kind of person, for instance, listens to those critics and spends good money on all that shit?”
- Lester Bangs, “We Are All Deadheads” (Music and Sound Output, April 1982)

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“There was only so much rejection of the mainstream possible if staying in business was a goal. [Trouser Press] unintentionally had a new audience — teenyboppers excited by our coverage of their faves but too young to share our sensibilities and our skepticism: one cover story on Duran Duran that attacked the band’s flaws caused howling letters of disillusionment and anger from kids who just wanted the good news on how cute they were. How could we put them on the cover and not worship them? It made sense to us — a big story is a big story, and a band is a mix of good and bad. Little did we know that no one else thought that way. These days, what serious publication dares think that way?”
- Ira Robbins, rockcritics.com interview, 2001

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PSF: So you think you were entertaining readers?
RM: Absolutely. Educating. Entertaining.  Screaming at, sounding out, etc.
- Richard Meltzer, Perfect Sound Forever interview, 2000

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“I don’t think when [Bangs] was writing, even when he was flying furthest afield, when it seemed like he was not saying anything at all about the record — when he was talking about himself — I think that eight times out of ten, the point he was making was actually profoundly fundamental to that record. He never had a disrespect for the reader to the point where… you know, Meltzer jokes about reviewing records that he never opened the shrink wrap… and that’s a fundamental disrespect to the reader. That having been said, Meltzer’s toss- offs about his bottle cap collection were probably a million times better than that Wishbone Ash record — whatever. But Meltzer has nothing but disdain for the Wishbone Ash fan, and maybe they deserve it, maybe they don’t.”
- Jim DeRogatis, rockcritics.com interview, 2002

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“I edited Creem magazine for five years, and we had, like hundreds of thousands of readers who really dug it that we were telling Dylan and the Stones and all these people to go jump in the lake. They weren’t idiots that just swallowed any hype that was shoveled to them. I really — I hate that, that everybody thinks that, that fans are just morons that’ll just swallow any garbage. ‘Cause I think the kids are really sharp. I talked to this 13 year old, he called me up the other day, he wants to write a book about Blondie that — he was right on top of it, you know?”
- Lester Bangs, 1980 (interview published in rockcritics.com)

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“If Smash Hits was basically useful, it also did its damnedest always to be interesting. Equal attention was paid to everything from the cover feature to the smallest picture caption. It was all given a character. Readers’ letters were scrutinized to discover who they wanted to read about and what they wanted to know.”
- Dave Rimmer, Like Punk Never Happened, 1985

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“When I was on Melody Maker, we always discovered that from the readers’ point of view, they were infinitely more interested in news and reviews and upcoming concerts than they were in think pieces. People would read about artists that they were interested in. It was unclear whether they were interested in reading intellectual think pieces about the state of music. I suspect think pieces about music would have to be considered more along the lines of think pieces about other art forms rather than in the context of rock journalism. In other words, if you take a good think piece journalist like Bob Christgau in the Voice, he would be read alongside other pieces about literature or art or theatre.”
- Simon Frith, Perfect Sound Forever interview, 2002

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“Magazines perform a range of specific mediating functions. Reviews of recent record releases connect the audience to the music by letting its members know which recordings have recently been released and which ones they might like. These reviews also connect the audience to itself, expressing its musical standards and values. For a pop audience criticism is irrelevant, but for a subculture, such as metal’s, the values expressed in the reviews are of great significance. Criticism also connects the musicians to their audience, affirming, clarifying, and applying the standards that they share.”
- Deena Weinstein, Heavy Metal: The Music and Its Culture, 1991

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“Good rock critics, by and large, don’t honor the boundary between classroom and hallway. This puts us at odds with most editors-in-chief, department heads, and those horrible people, the readers. The rules have no intellectual validity; we’re not following them; and the reader who wants reassurance through us that he’s smart isn’t going to get it from us in the standard way, and the reader who wants reassurance from us that he’s real isn’t going to get it either.”
- Frank Kogan, “Democratizing the Intellect,” in Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough: Essays in Honor of Robert Christgau, 2002

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“I can’t avoid my readership. They’re here, and I talk to them and I run their letters, many of which say ‘Dear Moron…’ I want to have that conversation. I think that’s the thing that’s missing in the New York media establishment. I know, because I’ve talked to those people. They don’t give a shit, they don’t know who they’re writing for. They’re writing for each other. They’re writing to further their career, and they’re writing to impress each other, and they don’t know who’s reading their copy.”
- Jim DeRogatis, interview with Mark Athitakis, 1998

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“One thing that a lot of rock critics do when they start out is they start writing for other rock critics… And I find with young writers, there’s this kind of impulse to show what you can do and to show that you own a copy of…the Beastie Boys’ ‘Cookie Puss’ EP, or that you really know something about the MC5 and that you can really draw a line between them and a new Detroit band. In doing that, people forget that they need to connect with a reader. There’s somebody who actually just cares about music, who might not be a rock criticism fan, who’s picking up an issue of Rolling Stone, Spin or Blender, and really just wants to find out what something sounds like and whether it’s worth checking out.”
- Nathan Brackett, rockcritics.com interview, 2002

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“But more than anything we want you to tell us what you think. Too often music criticism is a one-way street, with critics sitting on high and decreeing tastes and trends as they see fit. We have no interest in being tastemakers — we’re not cool enough for that, for a start. And so we open up every review, article, column and blog post on Stylus to your comments.”
- “Stylus Magazine Mission Statement” 2001

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“To Gloria, readers were just as important as stars.”
- Danny Fields, quoted in Dave Marsh’s Gloria Stavers obit, Rolling Stone, 1983

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“By the mid-’80s, my rock-crit colleagues were most agog over bands like R.E.M. and U2, whom I could appreciate but never felt any passion for (after punk, I could never understand the continued appeal of the great-rock-band concept). Just around the time that Robert Christgau was announcing his sensible theory of ‘semi-popular’ music, I switched over to covering the TV industry, where ‘semi-popular’ got you cancelled, and I re-discovered that I really liked writing about MASS culture, and increasingly disliked the prevailing trend in rock writing, which was: Pick a subculture (post-punk, dance, hip-hop, country, whatever), unearth the most obscure examples of it, and then write hipper-than-thou panegyrics. That wasn’t for me; I was happier using my newspaper skills to ponder ‘Seinfeld’ and eight-hour miniseries.”
- Ken Tucker (rockcritics.com interview, 2000)

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“I think I still have a sort of firehouse-dog response to music. You know, you hear the alarm go off, and you’re next to the truck with your tail wagging. If a song or performer catches my attention, there’s nothing I like better than getting into a big, insanely detailed discussion of what’s going on in that tune or that video or that career. I’m also pretty sure that I’m smarter about music than I was when I was a critic. I hear more, and I can make a better argument for why something that sounds negligible is a good song or why one that seems sort of plausible just reeks. But I haven’t made a consistent, determined effort to keep up, and that’s fatal. It’s not just that you have to hear the records. You have to know the context, either by living it as a fan or appreciating it as a critic, and now the context has just mushroomed. More and more, you can see even working critics giving up–just saying, ‘Screw it, I’m going to go on pretending that knowing something about Paul Simon is information worth sharing with you people, because I’ll go insane if I have to wake up every morning telling myself I care which one in N’Sync is Justin.’”
- Tom Carson (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“I could always recover my passion for the music every month, in some LP or other, UNTIL Creem died–it’s been more difficult since I lost my wedded-for-life journalistic outlet.”
-  Richard Riegel (rockcritics.com interview, 2000)

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“Let’s face it I just don’t listen to the stuff no more. Rock-related discs. Six months’ll go by between spins. I don’t play new stuff, I don’t play old stuff, I don’t even play Byrds albums for old friends sitting around drunk at 4 a.m. What I’m thinking is at last–maybe–I’m off the stuff. Which (if true) would make three loathsome habits of long duration I’ve kicked in less than a year; others were TV and Copenhagen (‘the smokeless tobacco’). What makes it a habit worth jettisoning should be obvious (some chronically self-attenuating variation on–or want of a more interesting nutshell–duh music IS repulsive, has BEEN repulsive, will forevermore BE repulsive & if not I still ain’t gonna be arount t’ notice.) All I’m listening to these days is jazz with a little occasional dub thrown in; I can’t hack voices while I’m typing and I seem to be typing the most I’ve typed since 1970 when I was not listening to rock and roll for the first or second official time (i.e., ain’t life funny).”
- Richard Meltzer, “The Minutemen (Exist)” (Village Voice) (reprinted in A Whore Just Like the Rest)

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“I had a double whammy moment, and a formal ‘drop out’ point in time that was 12/31/73. My favorite rock bands had all tanked in America (commercially)–Stooges, Slade, New York Dolls, Raspberries. Plus by that late moment in time all the rock prozines sucked–Creem and PRM [Phonograph Record Magazine] were both pretty lame by this point (PRM changed format around the end of 1973). Like a lot of other fans, I kinda thought rock music was over, kaput. So I wrote a half-page short on (Ohio hardpop-rock act, ok album on Mercury) Blue Ash in PRM‘s ‘year end roundup,’ with the distinct notion that this was the last thing I was ever gonna say re: ‘rock music’ in the prozine press, not that anyone was counting or keeping track anyway, and my comments were real negative (re: the state of ‘rock music’). Sure enough, 1974 was by far the worst year for rock music of the entire ’60s or ’70s. I became an ABBA fan and didn’t write a word in a national prozine for 25 years.”
- Mike Saunders (rockcritics.com interview, 2001)

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“Well, this could well be goodbye. I am leaning toward retirement, and at the age of 37 (for chrissakes, how come now you ask, don’t you think I feel bad enough about it as it is?), it’s about time. Time to get maybe a real full-time job and jettison adolescence. This isn’t to say all rock writers still hang on to theirs, but the percentage is kinda high, don’t you admit?”
- Stephen Hinerman, 1987 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll (Village Voice)

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“I don’t really want a job anymore where you have to think. The store has a lot of old films and foreign films. A lot of movie nuts come in and you get to talk about the movies. I couldn’t possibly go back to writing about rock. I don’t have any comparison points anymore. Nor do I care to listen to a lot of rock records to learn about them. I would not want to be in today’s music business and it would not want me in it either.”
- Paul Nelson (rockcritics.com interview, 2000)

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“I’ve been writing this column on and off since 1972 and I just decided to stop. I’ve got other things to do and I’ve said as much about Britain as I can for a while. Ever since the rise of punk, the difference between what’s happening here and what interests you there has been growing, and I’ve now lost a sense of what to write about.”
- Simon Frith, 1979 (“Letter from Britain” March ’79 issue of Creem)

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“I found writing about music… eventually I didn’t exactly run out of words, but I had a sort of exhaustion and I wanted to stop or cut right down on that. But with sport you always get a result, it happens in front of you, it’s physical, you can see it. Sport reveals character so it’s interesting to write about. The way people play a game is generally the way they are as a person and you can’t say that about music. Stan Getz made the most beautiful sound in the history of music but he was the biggest bastard God ever created and you can’t correlate the two things at all.”
- Richard Williams (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“My loss of interest has more to do with me than what’s out there, which I’m sure is the usual mix of whatever’s worthwhile and what’s not.”
- Phil Dellio, 2006 interview (Everybody’s a Critic)

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“I don’t yearn for the old days nor more music assignments. It’s physically painful for me to squelch my writing style to fit some editor’s idea of useful consumer advice. I hate rating records with numbers and stars and grades. I hate lists. And the older I get, the less I care what’s on MTV. I’d rather read a book.”
- Charles M. Young (rockcritics.com interview, 2001)

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“It looked like becoming a writer was going to be easy but as it turned out I didn’t have the tenacity or focus to develop a beat and in reality I was just as interested in politics and the New Left. Bob, and also Greil, offered me a number of opportunities that could have led to full-time writing gigs. I will always be grateful but as much as I enjoyed it and as honored as I am to have been a part of something I considered then and consider now a Worthwhile Endeavor and also An Important Cultural Moment, it was a combination of things that led to me never being a full time rock critic. I suppose it was a mix of desire, opportunity, and focus. I was interested in what I was interested in and couldn’t crank it out across the spectrum. And odd as it may sound, I found working at the phone company to be more interesting than writing about pop music.”
- Tom Smucker (rockcritics.com interview, 2000)

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“I don’t see edgy rock writing but then I’m not looking for it, it could be out there. To find that kind of writing stimulating I suppose you have to care about the genre, and at the moment I’m in a lull. I hope the lull ends, but it doesn’t really matter to me if it doesn’t. It’s a wide world out there with many, many different subjects to write about. Rock was a great topic for me, but to write about it forever seems a little limiting. And unfair to the younger writers who are probably a lot more into it than I am right now.”
- Gina Arnold (rockcritics.com interview, 2001)

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“In June, I chose not to remain a full-time rock critic. I now review new records for National Public Radio’s ‘Fresh Air’ and will freelance for anyone who’ll have me. But daily newspapers are no longer interested in rock criticism, or in any arts criticism at all, really. It’s an old story but truer than ever–editors are on the side of the public-relations departments in wanting only ‘positive’ profiles of the duperstars. I’m beyond caring whether I sound bitter or out-of-touch. For now, I’ll settle for a paradox: I’ll keep on writing about the music whenever and wherever I can, even as I give up on the idea of popular criticism.”
- Ken Tucker, 1987 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll (Village Voice)

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“Well, after Creem folded, that and this other magazine I was writing for–it started out being called Rock Video, and then it ended up being called Hard Rock–I was writing for both of those, and they both went out of business within a few weeks of each other, so I kept sending a few things out to different people I thought would like them, but there was just no response at all. So I eventually started working on other things, I had a mail order business for quite a while, and even worked in a record store–you know, just stuff to make money. I’d sure like to write stuff now, but no one is exactly flocking to my door saying, ‘Oh Rick, Rick, please write stuff for us and we’ll give you money.’”
- Rick Johnson (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“I did stop around 1983 or 1984 really in a way because I thought I was too old, I was about 24, 25. Then, not only did everybody else carry on, they all started inventing magazines and worked for Emap and did Smash Hits and Q and then Mojo and now The Word or whatever. Me and Ian Penman at the NME in the early ’80s used to get up to a few shenanigans and I often wonder whether the revenge on our hubris was the invention of Q and then Mojo and now the Americanisation of Uncut.”
- Paul Morley, interviewed by Peter Murphy (Official Web Site of Laura Hird)

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“Did I really give it up or am I just on extended sabbatical? I could never understand why other people gave it up. I remember interviewing Chrissie Hynde, who didn’t even want to discuss it. Then I realized she really didn’t see herself as a rock critic, it was not something she was particularly proud of, just a way of getting where she really wanted to be. I think the same was true of Patti Smith.”
- Deborah Frost (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“When I ‘dropped out’ of rock criticism, it wasn’t because I felt frustrated over gender issues but because I lost interest in rock, which had slipped out of the central cultural position it occupied in that rich 60s-70s period. As U.S. rock turned hegemonic, it mattered less relative to other cultural expressions. The moment was over. To immerse oneself in writing about rock and roll struck me as a sure-fire way of missing the beat as a writer and critic. That’s why many writers, female and male, expanded their repertoire to include music and film, tv, books, art, performance, travel essays, and other cultural subjects.”
- Daisann McLane, 1992 Pazz & Jop Critics Poll (Village Voice)

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“I never wanted to go back into music full-time. Now, the further away I get from writing about it the more I listen, not that I ever didn’t listen, but I just find myself buying albums–I don’t get free records anymore–and I listen all the time, and one of the things I feel quite strongly about is that writing about sport is a lot easier than writing about music.”
- Richard Williams (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“At 13, I started thinking about being a writer, with occasional interludes of wanting to be a musician or a psychologist. Now I fantasize about driving a cab. I despise the publishing business.”
- Charles M. Young (rockcritics.com interview, 2001)

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“I’m in retail, man, that’s much worse… But I didn’t go anywhere. Nobody wanted to print my writing, so that’s the reason.”
- Rick Johnson (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“I realize now that a lot of what I ‘achieved’ as a writer was all for the wrong reasons. I was very wrapped up in things that did not matter at all–really, a lot of nonsense–like where my byline was appearing, how big my pieces were. Just a lot of crap, which I don’t think was especially unique to me. And I would let myself get really sucked into the little games that other screwed up people would play. There were certain editors who were always trying to promote rivalries, particularly between women.”
- Deborah Frost (rockcritics.com interview, 2002)

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“I was talking to my agent yesterday, and I said to him, ‘Do you think it’s gonna reach the point where the only thing you can sell is a celebrity biography that’s just a puff job?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ You know? I sit around and wonder if maybe the best thing I could do for myself as a writer would be just to completely get away from all this stuff… I’m not gonna saw away at my violin here and try and break everybody’s heart, because like I said, I know I’ve got it easy. The fact is, I don’t have to get up in the morning and go work from 9 to 5 in a factory or something. And I do have access, and I do have a lot of things that, you know, nobody should feel sorry for me. But at the same time, everybody I know is just totally alienated and fed up and disgusted with just about everything, and I do know that most of the people in the media that are dispensing this stuff are as alienated from it as the audience is. The audience is just taking it because there’s nothing else being offered. And personally, I’m just wondering when people are gonna just say No! I refuse! I don’t want any anymore.”
- Lester Bangs (1980 interview published in rockcritics)

(Read the previous “Meme of the Day” here.)