“It’s worth noting throughout history, kids come around the corner to a multitude of casualties.”—The Hold Steady, “Multitude Of Casualties”

“Dude, I have no problem with being pop. Pop means pop-u-lar, which is cool with me.”—Fred Durst, from the August 1999 issue of Spin

“It’s the sound of a bunch of guys on coke, in the studio, not giving a fuck.”—Noel Gallagher on Oasis’ Be Here Now, in the documentary Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of Britpop

“Who doesn’t want to go to a concert to hear their favorite songs, regardless of who’s singing or who’s playing it? Listening to music you love to hear is fun, period.”—Rome Ramirez, on replacing Bradley Nowell as the new singer of Sublime

“Experiments will be left to a small avant garde, way out on the left, very solemn and romantic, and the bubblegum business in general will regard this avant garde with benevolence, will steal its best ideas and talents, but will otherwise ignore it.”—Nik Cohn, “The Monkees,” Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age…

“You can’t fire me because I quit.”—Nirvana, “Scentless Apprentice”

“Each artist had to grapple with what’s supposed to be a dichotomy between being popular and being ‘alternative.’ Once it became apparent that the fine line between the two was blurring, the rear guard from the underground—which I would define as deliberately non-pop, whereas I guess alternative would be relatively…

“There’s a lot of bands that get to a certain level, and it just stops. They scrap it. Compare this to, say, The Rolling Stones or The Who, where they just continued on forever and are still playing, or they quit after 20 years. But Talking Heads, or Jane’s Addiction, or The Police, or even Nirvana you could say, got…

“The Guns N’ Roses it’s okay to like.”—A headline about Nirvana from British music weekly New Musical Express

“I don’t want to sound snobby, but I was a snob back then, so why not—it wasn’t punk rock, it wasn’t underground, it wasn’t rebellious to me. I saw it as being very mainstream. Now had I been living in the Midwest and was bored with everything on MTV, and didn’t realize there was all this cool stuff going on, maybe I…