Words matter. These are the best Ian MacKaye Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.
I’ve always been a bit of a documentarian.
I’ve had people call me from bands that are very popular, and they’re like, ‘What do we do? We want to do what you do.’ It’s almost impossible to do what I do, because you would have to start in 1980. You can’t just do it.
What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.
I consider the guitar a tool for the most part. I do pick up the acoustic now and then, I certainly don’t have any routine. Usually the only time I practice is when the band gets together. Hendrix has always been one of my favorite players, but I was a sucker for Nugent in the late 1970’s.
American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it’s profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It’s just about sucking everything up.
I was into Ted Nugent, I was a Nugent guy. I was a skateboarder listening to Ted Nugent.
I never, ever had it in my mind that I wanted to be in the record industry, because I still contend that the record industry is an insidious affair. It’s this terrible collision between art and commerce, and it will always be that way.
I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork – basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I’m not a hoarder, though. I’m sort of a librarian.
Minor Threat was an important band, believe me that it was important it in my life, but it belongs to an era that no longer exists. I’m not nostalgic. I think music today is much more important, because something can be done about it.
I’m not a religious person, and I’m not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.
I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I’ve ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There’s no part of my life that I look at and go, ‘I don’t recognize that person at all.’
I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.
My point of view is, I’m just a person, and there are times when I look at other people and think, ‘My God, they spend so much time thinking about things that seem so absurd.’ But I’m sure people must think the same thing about me.
There are many things that people do happily that I can’t imagine why they would do it… But I have to say that even though I am critical or judgmental of society at large, I’m not critical of people individually. We are who we are.
Major labels didn’t start showing up really until they smelled money, and that’s all they’re ever going to be attracted to is money-that’s the business they’re in- making money.
I’ve done thousands of interviews in my life, and it’s a format that I quite enjoy, because I think of questions in interviews as an opportunity to sort of gauge my growth in a way. It gives me an idea of how I’m navigating this world that I’m in.
Basically we just created our own label, but again we just did it to document our own music and create our own thing, so the major labels were just always out of our picture, we’re not interested.
With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there’s a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn’t let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.
When people who are songwriters say ‘That’s my property and if you give it away for free then I’ll lose my incentive,’ then, well, good riddance.
Ultimately, I’m not the most prolific person, but I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I keep on putting out music. The only thing that drives music is the people who are making it.
I don’t dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don’t think it was a joke, I don’t think it was funny or a phase, I don’t think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don’t distance myself from any of it.
I feel completely fortunate to have this outlet for something I don’t really feel like I have a choice in, to make music. I’ve got to make it.
And in fact, one of the central reasons why I never got involved with any drugs or anything is that I remember talking to people in maybe 1975 who saw Hendrix but couldn’t remember it. I was like, ‘How could that be?’
I just have work to do; I just do it.