Mainstream Rejection Quotes

The traditional media never gave Bernie Sanders the time of day. But he went viral the same way hip-hop and new dances go viral. And I'm part of that culture.

Skating was popular, but it wasn't mainstream. It had this underground following, and you could go on tours, win decent prize money, and make royalties from signature products - that's how I came to buy a house when I was a senior in high school.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

A cult classic is one that has been fully embraced by an alternative audience, not the popular audience.

I think it's dynamite, the way my career has just kept moving, even when people didn't know it did. I made such interesting films, but, yeah, they're not necessarily the big movies that go to the supermarket. I don't need those movies, because I don't wanna do them.

President Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi represent what mainstream America is rejecting about Washington, D.C. And that is this out of touch with the people.

I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.

When I started playing in bands, we had to be apologetic for what we did. We had to be apologetic because the mainstream was so bad.

I've always been weird, and into weird stuff that has a hard time finding mainstream success.

I mean, maybe I'm alternative in that my stuff's not mainstream, doesn't want to be mainstream, could never be mainstream.

I'm willing to be different than other parents and go against the mainstream.

Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes.

I existed before the mainstream. Why would I join them? I watched the mainstream come up, and now I'm watching it collapse. I don't want to be a part of that.

There are people so alienated from the mainstream of American culture that it's like a parallel universe. They don't expect anything but trouble from the square world. Every time they interact with that world, they're given a ticket, sent to jail, drafted. It's never good. So they live by a separate value system.

I'm always at the opposite end of the spectrum, the opposite of hipster culture, and I enjoy that.

Music became so commercialized that I just didn't want anything to do with it. I renounced the industry before it became the fashionable thing to do.

I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.

I think a lot of people who become music fans have that moment where they break from their parents' music, they break from the radio and MTV - at least in my generation, they did, and MTV isn't really a thing anymore. And you discover something that defines you, that is outside of the mainstream.

You gotta look beyond the mainstream... the mainstream'll drown you, you know? There's always a pulse in the underground that I love. And the pulse in the underground is what keeps heavy metal alive.

I am kind of, by definition, a hipster.

I don't really give a f**k about the mainstream. The mainstream doesn't offer me anything. Why would I offer it anything? I love the world I have. I love the sort of subculture that Green Day represents.

By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.

Mainstream's never appealed to me, really. I mean, I've become popular over the years in certain areas. But mainstream, you know, I would rather the mainstream come to me.

I rap when I'm rich. I rap when I'm broke. I rap when I'm bullshit in the street. I rap about only having one woman now. If you can look at a continuum of my career, it's been an evolution of a real dude. So when I say I take my wife to the strip club, we're there, at the five-dollar joint. More than anything, I want people to take away that I'm not mainstream act.

Americans want grungy people, stabbing themselves in the head on stage. They get a bright bunch like us, with deodorant on, they don't get it.