"Well we've never been terribly corporate. My feeling has always been about the same, and it's a totally irrational feeling. To me, the corporations are just like the Medicis back in the Renaissance. They're there to give us money so we can do art. I am not one of these people that derides the suits and the business. The record companies are really easy to understand. They're in the business of selling records! And if you don't sell records, they don't want you. How hard is any of that to understand? I also know that the overwhelming majority of people that I've met in huge record companies have a love and a passion for music. They just gotta sell records. So I don't blame them for the state of things. Everyone says the suits and the corporations have ruined the music business. No. It's the musicians who've done it. The musicians are cowards. I would say the majority of musicians are cowards. If Sting had been brought up in '30s Germany, he probably would have been a Nazi! Musicians go along to get along. Their job is to seek approval. Their job is to be loved by the masses. So that's not a healthy person."
"We’ve only been asked to go on tour twice, by the Pixies and They Might Be Giants … oh and Gang of Four. That’s three strong, self-confident bands, but you’d be a fool to have Pere Ubu open for you otherwise. We have the Jerry Lee Lewis attitude of setting the damned piano on fire and saying: “Follow that.” The Pixies are our friends, but we did our best to go out and burn them down and I would expect anyone who opens for us to try and ruthlessly burn us. Let’s have enough of this hippy, sharing stuff. I’m not sharing nuthin’. It’s not personal. They’re your friends, but burn them!"
Yeah, but respect calling out musicians for their sheer lack of balls. Artists need to take more chances musically and stfu with the generic parroting
Austin Hughes
Why did jans delete comment above about the most shilled female artist atm?
Ryder Morgan
>It's the musicians who've done it. The musicians are cowards. I would say the majority of musicians are cowards. Ok. One situation that really illustrates this well is all the hair metal guys still being spectacularly asshurt over Nirvana and friends making them instantly irrelevant. Why? It was their own fault because they were cowards riding a stale, past-its-time format down with the Titanic. Everyone was completely burned out on hair metal including, I'm sure a lot of record label people (after all, they love music too as Dave notes). So they figured out what the next big rock movement was and threw all the dinosaurs overboard.
It was especially bad for those very late groups like Warrant who should have grown a brain and realized that glam rock was not the way of the future in freaking 1990.
Wyatt Turner
he's based for thinking that punk and hip hop is some of the worst music ever made
Nolan Lopez
I wonder how Christgau loves PU so much given their dislike of those genres.
Ethan Russell
who?
Asher Jones
now I gotta read this - how can these weirdos call out other weirdos?
Or the washed-up dadrockers who got cut by labels and were reduced to putting out albums on CMC Records and complaining how the industry and radio programmers didn't care about what their fans wanted to hear.
>as if people were dying for a new REO Speedwagon album in 1993 >as if record labels don't have finite resources and it might, oh I dunno, make sense to promote fresh, upcoming talent people might want to hear
Justin James
I remember seeing a video from this decade where he says that the people who collect vinyl are idiots. Goes on to use facts to diss vinyl’s sound quality
I apologize for calling you an ass-eating ass man.
Eli Campbell
From my experience, most oldfags/boomers don't like vinyl at at all and have no idea why anyone would want it back. Christgau also said in that one Q&A he'd much rather use CDs.
Nathan Lee
>It was especially bad for those very late groups like Warrant who should have grown a brain and realized that glam rock was not the way of the future in freaking 1990. Hard to find much sympathy for them. Was their entire knowledge of the rock world limited to MTV? Anyone who was keeping up with current happenings in the underground rock scene in the late 80s could have easily figured out what was coming.
Labelled it pretty accurately: Punk is the triumph of attitude over reality. Rap is its extension.
Liam Sanders
I remember reading this a while back. He treats scruffy with indifference and contempt lol. To be fair, scaruffi fluffs up his questions with a lot of pretension
