Musical Subversion Quotes

I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, 'That's what I want to do.' I thought classical music was corny.

When I started DJing years ago, I took great delight in annoying the audience. Playing Johnny Cash in the middle of a banging night.

Edgy' music has always formed the cornerstone to any teenage rebellion. Most indulge in it precisely because adults like me don't like them doing so.

I've always been enthralled with chaos and mayhem musically, and I loved speaking out and challenging stuff, and I thought, why is my music not representing this?

In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble's a good thing - you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.

The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock 'n' roll.

It kills me when I see some metal band trying to pass themselves off as an 'alternative band.'

I think there are certain genres of music where people are allowed to go on, but there is something about rock and roll, I guess because it originally started out to be a teenage rebellion.

You can get really left of centre influences in mainstream pop. Michael Jackson and Prince are some of the most progressive artists ever if you actually dissect their songs there's some crazy stuff going on.

Why am I a closet country music fan? Because I grew up being into rock, and I always thought that country music was, like, something my mom was into. Like, it wasn't cool. It wasn't happening. They were all singing about driving around in their trucks looking for Lulu.

I want to be taken seriously as the type of musician that plays stuff like an electric rake. I mean, how seriously do you take someone like Spike Jones? They take him pretty seriously - a really good musician who made a great contribution in terms of humor, which is part of what I try to do too.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.

It was easy for people to be derisive about our music because they saw what we were doing as retro. But we were like barbarians trying to crash the gates of the bloated progressive rock that we despised.