Irving Berlin said, “Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.” That doesn’t mean it’s good or bad – that’s the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?
John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.
All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the “fifties” or “sixties,” as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.
Rock is for everybody; it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody’s qualified to perform it should never even arise.
Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates.
I’ve always believed the New Left is rank.
I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.
As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.
The real question is what to live for. And I can’t answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art’s sake, corny as that sounds.
I mean it’s easier to be in a demonstration if it’s a trip that’s one of the reasons why the whole thing fell apart in 1971, because it wasn’t a trip any longer.
I’m really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there’s something inherently, even violent about it, it’s wild and raw and all this.
Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude, it’s not a musical form of a strict sort. It’s a way of doing things, of approaching things. Writing can be rock ‘n’ roll, or a movie can be rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a way of living your life.
I mean the interesting thing I think would be if something happened like, what happened in England where all these kids that all of a sudden can’t afford the ticket prices.
The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.
In fact I think now we’ve reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don’t know what’s going on, and we don’t care.
I don’t see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
The thing is that, they all had real strong personalities and real distinct identities, and I don’t find most of the groups that are coming out now really do.
I can guarantee you one thing, we will never agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.
Like almost all of Beefheart’s recorded work, it was not even “ahead” of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one.
If there’s nothing more poisonous than bigotry, there’s nothing more pathetic than liberal guilt.