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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Ian MacKaye Quotes

Music is a language and different people who come along are each using that language to do something different, but all coming at it in a similar vein inasmuch as it’s always community based and for the most part nonprofit. Most bands don’t ever come within a mile of profit – clearly these people are not playing music to make money.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

My focus is always on the day. What I’ve done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn’t abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it’s all real to me. I’m basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.

– Ian MacKaye

I stand behind all the lyrics I’ve ever written; I don’t have a problem with that.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

An unlocked door means that, occasionally, you might get a devil come in, but a locked door means you have thousands of angels just walk by.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You’re dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won’t do that to other people.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

Yeah, if someone’s selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they’re trading it I don’t mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand.

– Ian MacKaye

There are certainly good examples of incredibly brilliant, beautiful music that has been made commercially available and sold everywhere. But I would say that, for the most part, quantity certainly does not speak well for quality.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

I’m really anti-option, so computers have been my nightmare with recording. I don’t want endless tracks; I want less tracks. I want decisions to be made.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

I was into Ted Nugent, I was a Nugent guy. I was a skateboarder listening to Ted Nugent.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

I’m always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

Part of the way the work world works is not so much creating a separation between your work and your free time, but creating the illusion of a separation between your work and your free time. Every day is the weekend for me, which means I’m always busy.

– Ian MacKaye

I just have work to do; I just do it.

– Ian MacKaye

I think sometimes my humor is extremely dry, and a lot of times I would say things that I thought were very funny but… I have a reputation of – people think of me as a very fundamentalist, humorless fellow.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye

The first time I ever recorded, which was into my boom-box, I was like, ‘Wow, check that out.’ It sounded great. The narcotic of it was so intense – it was pleasurable. I was like, ‘You sound like a band.’ Then I ended up spending the rest of my life trying to chase that initial high again.

– Ian MacKaye

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.

– Ian MacKaye