John Rzeznik Quotes

Obviously, I would like to play to bigger audiences and have a bit more success, but not if I have to commercialize.

I'm just not interested in selling out to get on the charts and make people happy.

The artists in country music who stopped having hits are the ones who were led into something that wasn't them.

If you go to Hollywood, you've already sold out.

I don't want to be 'box-office girl,' but I don't want to be 'that indie girl' either.

Since I became part of the zeitgeist, I've been called a sellout many times.

I would rather fall flat on my face than try to just make a quick dollar by making music that fits into the radio format right now. It does nothing for me.

If any of our songs ever did make it on the top ten, I'd disband the group immediately.

Selling out isn't selling out anymore. It's getting the brass ring.

We had a huge audience, we sold truckloads of albums. If we do something that's cool, people will listen to it. If we don't, we would be selling people short.

It's a strange thing, this idea that for some reason, if a lot of people like what you're doing, it's therefore not very good. We use the phrase that a band have 'sold out.' Just so you know, if you're doing a gig and you sell all your tickets, that is a brilliant thing to do.

Who decides what is and what isn't punk? I want to write songs that people hear and feel, and I want to be successful and reach a big audience. I'm not trying to be the coolest guy in the world; I'm trying to write songs that mean something to people. As you get successful, sometimes you lose one set of fans and gain another.

Despite whatever commercial kind of success you might have or radio success, I don't want to do something just to get as many people as possible to listen.

To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.

If the choice is between doing something supercool and having no one hear it and doing something equally cool and tricking people into putting it on the radio, I don't think the second option is some big sellout.

In my opinion, some of the hip-hop records that come out, people are willing to compromise. I'm not.

There's a lot of pressure that comes from the mainstream stuff, and already people who have been saying - people who don't know any better - have been saying things to me like, 'You should really think about neosoul. You'd definitely be more successful in that.' But that's not my expression.

I don't think you're selling out by allowing the masses to love your art. The only curse is that, when you get so big, sometimes people forget to look at the music.

In trying to cross over to the mainstream, some people stopped writing what they witnessed.

I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.

For the first four or five years I was in Korea, I took a lot of direction from my management and label in terms of what people want. I found myself trying to fit into that thing I never felt comfortable with because the critique I got was that I was too American, and too sophisticated and polished in terms of my musicality and it won't sell.

Becoming a commercial scene? I don't think people in grime would be happy about that.

With country, it's hard to penetrate the thick layers of commercialism that have been applied like shellac coatings over the real thing.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

I think no matter what you do, a certain amount of people are going to call you a sellout, somehow, you know. If I ever start trying to make a living on it.