Steve Strange: I ran a very tight ship in terms of my door policy. I wanted creative-minded pioneers there who looked like a walking piece of art, not some drunken, beery lads. The best move I made was turning Mick Jagger away at the door. He was wearing trainers.

Malcolm McLaren: Rotten had terrible shoulders. Round and flabby Irish shoulders. And his body was the shape of a pear. But in the clothes that we gave him he always looked wonderful. He was a wonderful mannequin for the clothes that Vivienne [Westwood] and I designed for him. He complained about them, of course. I sold a lot of trousers off the back of Johnny Rotten.

I see these distinctions in a way I was unable to twenty years back, because I was caught up in a narrow margin among people who read only a handful of books, and of a certain kind: Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm, The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll, some Bukowski, some Burroughs, You Can’t Win by Jack Black, and [Denis] Johnson’s 1992 story collection Jesus’ Son. We were young bohemians who thought you were supposed to live like that.

Jeg vil da reflektere over de kulturelle forskjellenes natur, slik de blir konstruert i ulike diskurser, og jeg bør nok begynne med å advare om at jeg kommer til å bruke termen diskurs ad nauseam for noen.

Morfar sa att [Ingmar] Bergman var en borgerlig kverulant, orädd för avföring men feg för politik. Visst, sa pappa, det förstår sig mästerregissören på. Och pattar.

The biggest name to emerge from the New York scene was Moby, who in 1991 had reached No. 10 on the British chart with a rave-inspired dance track called “Go”. (This was a kind of triple crossover: a British hit by an American producer inspired by a British scene built on an American genre.)

But I can’t help but wince when people talk about hip-hop as the high-minded, Pulitzer Prize-winning genre they feel it should be, rather than the rowdy and messy genre it usually has been. And I wince partly because I’m not sure that a purely high-minded version of hip-hop would have lasted so long, or spread so far, or inspired so many. Kendrick Lamar’s rhymes are studied in school—quite rightly, too. But surely hip-hop benefits from the continuing existence of rappers whose music doesn’t sound remotely like homework.

But nowadays, rock history seems not linear, but cyclical. There is no grand evolution, just an endless process of rediscovery and reappraisal, as various styles and poses go in and out of fashion.

Elton John was also an exception in another respect: unlike most of the glitter-rock stars, he was not a traditional heartthrob. In 1974, he was described by NME as a ”balding, bespectacled plumpoid”.

In the 2010s, rock music in America—real, loud rock music, not some gentle or artsy variant of it, played by new or newish bands and not elderly veterans—was alive but relatively obscure, at least when compared to hip-hop or pop.

This high wall that was built between art and data had to be torn down.

Subjectivity is just objectivity waiting for data.

“Apparently there’s this prince,” Wes said, “Did you know they still had princes in Norway? Pia met him at a climate conference and he wouldn’t leave her alone. Then he introduced her to his dad.”
Delaney took a stab. “The king?”
“Right, the king! And then the king was flirting with her for twenty minutes, in front of everyone. She’s thinking she might have to wear a disguise.”

«Hadde Roald Dahl en kunstig nese?»
«Ja, på militærsykehuset i Kairo eller Alexandria eller hvor det nå var, lappet de ham sammen igjen, men han hadde hele tiden en neseprotese, senere.»
«Å ja, det var bra. Det visste jeg ikke. Han var en mann med et svært bra utseende. En neseprotese er jo nærmest som en utlagt tarm.»

Jo, efter gymnasiet reste Alexander runt i åratal i hela världen och skrev till mig att han till exempel sökte spåren efter låten You're my heart, you're my soul av Modern Takling, som ju verkligen är en väldigt, väldigt dårlig låt, men han reste i varje fall runt för att se hur långt You're my heart, you're my soul hadde spritt sig, inte på ställen som Fuerteventura och så, det vet man ju att folk gärna lyssnar på sådant där, utan just i Pakistan och i Bangladesh och i Kambodja.

Jeg satte ølene og colaen i kjøleskapet, la snacksen i skapet, gikk bort til doen for å drite, men døra var låst, og jeg gikk inn i stua og satte på tv-en så lenge.

For those of a certain mindset, [Judith] Butler is the Harry Potter of philosophy, transforming boring old truisms about the material world into something alchemical, shifting and sexily impermanent. This effect is heightened by the famous opacity of Butler’s prose style, which can make people think they must be accessing really deep truths, and by the fact that Butler rarely spells out the consequences of her view, coyly offering with one sentence what she then seems to take away with another.

The drover who had spoken him swept past with bowed back and hands aloft, a limp and ragged scarecrow flailing briefly in that rabid frieze so that Holme saw tilted upon him for just a moment out of the dust and pandemonium two walled eyes beyond hope and a dead mouth beyond prayer, borne on like some old gospel recreant seized sevenfold in the flood of his own nether invocations or grotesque hero bobbing harried and unwilling on the shoulders of a mob stricken in their iniquity to the very shape of evil until he passed over the rim of the bluff and dropped in his great retinue of hogs from sight.

She crouched in the bushes and watched it, a huge horse emerging seared and whole from the sun's eye and passing like a wrecked caravel gaunt-ribbed and black and mad with tattered saddle and dangling stirrups and hoofs clopping softly in the dust and passing enormous and emaciate and inflamed and the sound of it dying down the road to a distant echo of applause in a hall forever empty.

Who lives there?

They don't nobody live there now. Used to be a mink-trapper lived there but he got snakebit and died. Been snakebit afore and throwed it off. This'n got him in the neck. When they found him he was kneelin down like somebody fixin to pray. Stiff as a locust post.