Ani DiFranco Quotes

Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall.

All of youth culture is packaged and sold back to us at this furious rate these days. I think it's part and parcel to this corporate encroachment on our lives in general.

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

I think one of the problems with the capitalist mainstream is this: no matter what you create to respond or resist it they will buy it.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

There are two kinds of artists left: those who endorse Pepsi and those who simply won't.

The '60s are presented to kids today as a commodity.

So many things for me are unfortunate in the commercialization of something that is special. It's like when Led Zeppelin appears in Cadillac commercials. There's something that is taken away from your love of this thing and your connection to it.

But I think the image that's thrown out on television is a bad image. Because you see players who want to imitate hip-hop stars. And the NBA is taking advantage of the situation.

I don't think there's any such thing as rock n' roll anymore - it's an amalgamation of business interests.

Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.

The '90s was a decade of mundane market-consumer nothingness where there was nothing coming up from the streets; you just had someone in an office deciding what was cool.

Rock and roll has become entertainment that just says what the consumer wants to hear. There's no more edge or rebellion that sets it apart from the norm.

Сommercial hip-hop is not youth rebellion, not when the heroes of hip-hop like Puffy are taking pictures with Donald Trump and the heroes of capitalism - you know that's not rebellion. That's not "the street" - that's Wall Street.

If you think you can lead your flock of sheeple and peeps to some glorified noodle fest on the mall, you got another thing coming, mister.

The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them.

We are told No, you're unimportant, you're peripheral - get a degree, get a job, get a this, get that, and then you're a player. You don't even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

They sought out rap music to attack, but you don't hear that anymore because it made too much money. They use Che Guevara to sell soft drinks. If something comes out that is radical and it's successful, then it's no longer radical. It's co-opted.

What's most insidious about MTV is that it commodifies precisely those things that young people believe are subversive. In other words, subversity itself has become a commodity. It's all a way to trick young people into believing that there's something unique about what they do, but this is all completely a corporately designed maneuver.

When Black Flag and DOA and all those bands were touring in the early 80s, it was kind of a forest and you just kind of got your way through it. Now it's like a six lane highway with Starbucks every twenty meters. That's just civilization.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

Freedom to rock, freedom to talk. Freedom, raise your fist and yell.

Labels want to capture a certain market of kids and blah blah blah, and it's true, I just never think about that stuff. It's all part of a chain that's moving along, but this phase of music has to switch.