Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey In Rural North Dakota Quotes
"It’s easy for me to recall the morning I was absorbed into the cult of heavy metal. As is so often the case with this sort of thing, it was all my brother’s fault."
"When you actually are eleven, your life always feels exhaustively normal, because your definition of 'normal' is whatever is going on at the moment."
"The most popular song in my elementary school was Eddy Grant’s 'Electric Avenue,' but that was destined to be replaced by Prince’s 'Let’s Go Crazy.'"
"The only exposure anyone in Wyndmere had to punk rock was an episode of Quincy that focused on the rising danger of slam dancing."
"There were five hundred people in my hometown, and exactly zero of them knew about Motorhead, Judas Priest, or anything loud and British."
"The first cassette would redirect the path of my life: Shout at the Devil by Mötley Crüe."
"I was possessed, just as Tipper Gore always feared; I had no choice but to listen to these songs again. And again. And again."
"But for someone (read: me) who had never really listened to albums before—I had only been exposed to singles on the radio—Shout at the Devil took on a conceptual quality that Yes would have castrated themselves to achieve."
"I was a myopic white kid who had never drank, never had sex, had never seen drugs, and had never even been in a fight."
"I’ve never understood why European heavy metal is so appealing to kids who like shooting themselves in the head, but they obviously love it."
"I’m certain no one ever killed themselves listening to Long Cold Winter, but Tom was still talking about life and death."
"It’s all too easy to get attention by making yourself dead. I was trying to get attention by being alive in a really obvious way."
"Our greatest artists are the ones who understand how they can be interesting and unique within those limitations."
"The more people who are affected by a piece of art, the more important it is."
"The only thing important about art is how it affects people."
"The world was subjected to punk by ’77, which burned itself out before anyone got rich."
"Punk was perfect for lazy people, because anyone could do it—you didn’t even need to know how to play your instrument."
"The paradox is that metal bands ended up taking their cues from all the guys who had been able to make a living by ripping off Bowie."
"But people still wanted to act famous (don’t they always?), so that opened the door to glam metal in ’83."
"We make our own rules, we live our own life, and you can follow us but we won’t follow anybody else. KISS is a way of life."
"You don’t want a large female audience. If you depend on women to buy your records, you end up going the way of New Kids on the Block. Female audiences tend to be unfaithful."
"Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn."
"Girls who love the Backstreet Boys love them in a way that made my teenage adoration for Mötley Crüe seem pale."
"Males have a weird sense of loyalty toward the bands they like; they sometimes view record buying as a responsibility."
"Guys like pop culture even when it’s not there; more specifically, they like music even when they’re not listening to it."
"Young males like rock music—and culture as a whole—both tangibly and intangibly."
"Young females are more vehement about the former and virtually indifferent about the latter."
"I had seen this woman vomit. I had seen this woman gorge herself on pancakes. I had been with her when she purchased tampons. Regardless of her unspeakable midwestern sexiness, I would always recognize her as a genuine person."
"I had never had an orgasm while I was awake. The only sexual outlet in my entire life was rock music."
"There is a value to art that appeals to visceral idiocy; there is an intellectual aspect to negative ideas."
"The overwhelming majority of what you’ll hear will be wretched."
"That’s the reality of rock ’n’ roll: Just about every band is absolute shit."
"The main reason white kids didn’t immediately embrace rap is because they didn’t understand the music."
"We were never worried about nuclear war or global warming; we were, however, nervous that someone was going to foreclose on my parents’ farm."
"There were only two kinds of music in rural America during the 1980s: metal and country."
"In the eyes of hard-rockin’ female teens, Bret Michaels was the kind of guy who would take you to a keg party on the back of his motorcycle and act real macho around his friends—but you knew he wasn’t going to get drunk and punch anybody."
"In the twenty-first century, Satan can be smoked, snorted, and shot."
"You can kind of 'experiment' with the occult by buying certain albums."
"No matter how much people still describe themselves as 'Christian' in census surveys, we live in a primarily agnostic culture."
"Just about everyone in the free world perceives Back in Black as AC/DC’s ultimate contribution to society."
"The content of the disc is irrelevant; I simply assume gold would be malleable enough to pound into an arrowhead so I could kill myself a wild boar."
"We were drawn to pop singers who consciously downplayed the Hollywood image."
"It’s naive and irrational to expect a world where everyone is enlightened."
"It’s hard to imagine rock music done any other way, though. That’s the nature of personal art."
"The best songs on Out of the Cellar tend to be the 'hits,' which equate to 'Round and Round,' 'Back for More' and 'Wanted Man.'"
"We simply could not resist the awe-inspiring power of Ratt ’n’ Roll."
"Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley forced him to slow down and play behind the beat, which was an attempt to mimic Ace Frehley’s style."
"By and large, Lick It Up is a pretty good hard rock record and the catalyst for KISS’ recovery as a platinum-selling artist."
"Tipper Gore was actually the best thing that ever happened to W.A.S.P."
"It’s impossible to deconstruct a song like 'Breaking the Law,' nor can you deny the tight, clean perfection of 'Living After Midnight.'"
"If Lick It Up had tanked, one might speculate that KISS would have folded—or maybe they just would have reunited with Ace and Peter ten years earlier."
"Heavy Metal, Music from the Motion Picture: This movie is pretty lousy if you’re sober and/or an adult."
"Ace’s problem as a frontman was always abundantly obvious: His voice is terrible. But that’s also his strength."
"I still occasionally catch myself mispronouncing their name 'Telsa,' just like every other kid at my school."
"Girls Girls Girls ends up being a very nihilistic project, probably by accident."
"I tend to like the first three songs on side two (especially 'Five Years Dead,' mostly because it sounds like they’re saying 'Bach is dead,' which actually makes more sense)."
"Warrant, Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich: The first release by the very first band I ever saw play live."
"David Lee Roth is that uncle, and Eat ’Em and Smile is his master work."
"Bon Jovi was the same way; he wrote literal lyrics and dulcet melodies, and they didn’t worry about credibility or attitude or the legacy of Tony Iommi."
"Part of the sonic weirdness comes from a bizarre production decision: You can’t hear Jason Newsted’s bass lines at all on … And Justice for All, and that’s intentional."
"However, the real kicker is the intro to the title track. For no particular reason, Rhoads plays twenty-five seconds of the Doors’ 'Spanish Caravan.'"
"The title cut is probably the album’s best rocker, while the closing ballad 'On with the Show' is the finest slow song the band would ever make."
"Appetite for Destruction is the singular answer to the question, 'Why did hair metal need to exist?'"
"At 3:00 P.M. the next day, my story was basically done."
"Hoskyns describes himself as an 'Americaphile'."
"If you’re trying to ask me if I saw any credibility in Poison, I’m certainly not going to say ‘yes.’"
"I enjoy hating musicians far more than I enjoy appreciating them."
"Cobain’s suicide was the only 'great' thing that happened to music in the 1990s."
"People who take rock music seriously in a literal sense always seem to be missing the point."
"As far as I’m concerned, when someone becomes a rock star, he quits being a person."
"The danger is that the people who love wrestling (and metal) the most don’t want to see the joke."
"Ted Nugent would be funnier if I ever got the sense he was lying."
"Bush was a good band who just happened to signal the beginning of the end; ultimately, they would became the grunge Warrant."
"Kid Rock’s white trash sensibility makes him seem drug-addled and a little ridiculous, but I love the fact that he’s so earnest about this shit."
"Rage Against the Machine was the band that made me realize I was no longer a target market for hard-rock bands."
"For the next two and a half years, I felt as though I had to be drunk (or at least drinking) whenever I was out in public."
"I’m a party professional. I stay in on New Year’s Eve because all the amateurs are out."
"I’m sure if Warrant had kept putting out decent records, I’d own one of those home-brewing kits."
"Sometimes this assumption was right. Obviously, you had Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads."
"He was a nice guy and a very good guitarist, but he wasn’t a Hendrix or a Clapton or anything like that."
"I have to admit that I’m a pretty bad influence on a lot of people."
"The synergy between booze and hair metal is as exquisite as that of the brandy and ginger ale currently glimmering in front of me."
"Most rock groups dream of being bigger than the Beatles. Korn does not share that dream."
"I can’t fathom fourteen-year-olds jumping around their bedroom and screaming about 'profits for the bourgeois', but it obviously must happen."
"The sad irony is that almost everything Stone Temple Pilots released after their 1992 debut (Core) was damn good."
"Every little nuance of STP makes them seem like they should be an ’80s metal band, from their charismatic, drug-addled frontman to their Zeplified riffing and earnest respect for melody."
"Musicians are always insisting that they want their own identity and they don’t want to be pigeonholed into a 'type,' but once they achieve that aspiration, it somehow makes them seem less consequential."
"The quest for musical immortality is not a simple one, and being able to do many things well is usually not as effective as doing just one thing perfectly."
"My gut reaction was that maybe Queensryche had always been different, and that their technical virtuosity superseded the limitations of the genre."
"If you strip away everything else, the Rolling Stones are simply a blues band."
"Every pop act that earns major commercial success with one album (or especially with one single) always faces the same criticism from anyone outside of their audience: 'In five years, no one will know who these guys are.'"
"Our culture has become fascinated with public failure."
"The problem is that 'arena rock' is not like fly fishing for walleye or throwing horseshoes: The window for being able to do it with any social relevance is very small, especially when you play heavy glam."
"Metal frontmen are supposed to be vocally aggressive and recklessly edgy, and they’re supposed to represent the kind of animalistic sexuality that is only found in seventeen-year-old males."
"Heavy metal is tied to youth. Living the teenage dream is a gorilla on every glam singer’s shoulders."
"I’m a metal fan, okay? I like listening to Mötley Crüe."
"Hair metal was a wormhole for every midwestern kid who was too naive to understand why he wasn’t happy. I may have been a loser, but Vince and Axl and Ace and Ozzy were cool for me."