Steven Hyden > Quotes

“If you're reading this book, there is probably an artist or band whose music you have an intense personal relationship with. I would also guess that this artist or band came into your life during a time when you were highly vulnerable. if this is the case, this artist or band might be the closest thing you had to a confidant. in fact, he, she, or it was better than a confidant, because his/her/its music articulated your own thoughts and feeling better than you ever could. This music elevated the raw materials of your life to the heights of art and poetry. It made you feel as if your personal experience was grander and more meaningful than it might otherwise have been. And naturally you attributed whatever that music was doing to your heart and brain to the people who made the music, and you came to believe that the qualities of the music were also true of the music's creators. "If this music understands me, then the people behind the music must also understand me," goes this line of thought.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“A Default Smart Opinion is an opinion that’s generally considered to be inarguable because it’s repeated ad nauseam by seemingly intelligent individuals. Other examples include “Nickelback sucks!,” “The Big Bang Theory sucks!,” and “Kim Kardashian is dumb and also sucks!”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“In 1902, a sociologist named Charles Horton Cooley devised a concept called the looking-glass self, which posits that s person's sense of identity is shaped by interaction with social groups and the ways in which the individual thinks he or she is perceived by others. Cooley believed this process involved three steps: •You imagine how you appear to other people. •You imagine the judgment of other people. •You base your feelings about yourself on how you think [you] appear to other people.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“These days MTV is known for…I actually don’t know what MTV is known for now. I haven’t watched MTV regularly in at least fifteen years. I assume MTV’s programming consists of reality shows in which twenty-one-year-olds flash their junk in exchange for Skrillex tickets, but don’t quote me on that.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“Violence will ruin your day and stain your clothes.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“In the hierarchy of eighties heartland rock, Bruce Springsteen was president, Tom Petty was vice president, John Mellencamp was speaker of the house, Bob Seger was president pro tempore, and Bryan Adams was (I guess?) secretary of leather jackets.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“I’ve repeated this process with virtually every major classic-rock artist and band that I love. I am now fully versed in the postsixties work of the Kinks, even the double-album rock operas that go on for forty-two hours. I enjoy at least one Doors album, An American Prayer, that was completed and released seven years after Jim Morrison died. I will defend not only both Page & Plant albums, but also the Page & Coverdale record. I own albums by every iteration of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and will argue that Crosby & Nash is in fact better than CSNY (though not CSN). I’m still not crazy about nineties Springsteen, but I will listen to Human Touch and Lucky Town when I don’t feel like playing Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River for the ten thousandth time. Come to think of it, Lucky Town is in fact much better than most people (even myself) give it credit for.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“What is life? It is a series of arrangements that each of us makes in order to slow down the deterioration process as much as possible. Everybody faces the same decisions as they advance in age—behavior that was fun when you were younger (excessive drug and alcohol intake, indiscriminate sexual encounters with the powerfully magnetic and questionably sane, residing in shitholes with hygiene-averse scumbags) can’t continue when you get older or else the death march gets accelerated. Mature people learn over time how to structure their lives in such a way that the likelihood of dying is minimized. Eventually the menu of fun items that won’t instantly kill you is reduced to a small selection of spicy entrees, then a zesty appetizer or two, then a glass of water and a spoon (because forks and knives could cut your terrifyingly translucent skin, you decrepit old coot). I”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“In his book The Economy of Prestige, author and professor James English suggests that awards serve a dual, seemingly contradictory role in society: first, they exist in order to bestow a marker of quality on items (such as films, music, and TV shows) that don’t have any intrinsic value. But awards also create a forum where the value of what awards represent—the commodification of art—can be debated.”
― Steven Hyden, Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About the Meaning of Life

“If you love rock ’n’ roll, your favorite bands give your life continuity. They keep your memories alive and accessible. They bond you to your friends. They link who you are to who you were. They endure even as the rest of your life fades into the past.”
― Steven Hyden, Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation

“The mythology is what hooked me. Some kids read comic books; others glamorize athletes. My superheroes were rock stars who either had been deceased for decades or were well ensconced in the throes of middle age by the time I discovered them.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“I try to remind myself of how awesome downloading music used to be. Because now it's about as thrilling as ordering paper towels from Amazon. The more convenient that downloading became, the less fun it was.”
― Steven Hyden, This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century

“Here’s a valuable lesson I’ve learned from working as a music journalist for nearly twenty years: if given the choice between interviewing a hip, up-and-coming musician and interviewing a past-his-prime has-been, take the has-been every single time. Some of my favorite interviews ever are with artists whose music I don’t even like. I’m talking about the time that Poison guitarist C. C. DeVille told me about how he used to drink paint thinner when he ran out of booze. Or when Kip Winger told me he still hates Lars Ulrich for throwing a dart at a Winger poster in Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” video. Has-beens have nothing to lose, whereas younger, hipper artists must think politically, as being candid can hurt you in the long run.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Part of loving classic rock is regarding the road as a fearsome yet romantic metaphor for living a life of absolute freedom outside of normal society—precisely the kind of life that most of us will never live. We want our heroes on the stretch of concrete, enduring one blackout night and hungover morning after another, because it enables us to witness the very extremes of human existence from a safe vantage point. Levon stayed on the road. He went down swinging. All Robbie did was talk about it.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“people probably hated disco because it inflamed something dark inside of them that they might not have known was there, and they also probably hated disco because disco (like a lot of pop music) was getting pretty fucking ridiculous and played out in 1979. What’s not disputed in either narrative is the suggestion that”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Sometimes, they were even willing to get their hands dirty. In Fredric Dannen’s 1990 book Hit Men, the best-ever exposé of the music business of the seventies and eighties,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Steve Gorman,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Apparently, Paul McCartney and I were on the same wavelength that night, because five songs into the set, he played a number that only a small, demented fraction of the audience wanted to hear. And yet there he was, jamming on “Temporary Secretary,” seemingly oblivious to the mass confusion created by the song’s mind-bending mess of synth bleeps and slashing acoustic guitar and McCartney’s robo-ranting about needing a woman who can be a belly dancer but not a true romancer. I loved it, and I loved how the people around me didn’t love it.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The part of “Bobby Jean” that always gets me—the part that always gets everybody—is the last verse, in which Bruce imagines Bobby Jean hearing this exact song in some motel room. It’s the most meta moment in Bruce Springsteen history, and”
― Steven Hyden, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen's “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland

“Millions of Gen-Xers and Millennials watched the fallout from Bush vs. Gore unfold in the news while Kid A droned on endlessly through their headphones. It was an eerily ideal soundtrack for what seemed like a darker, more foreboding time after the peace and prosperity of the ’90s—a gloomily disorienting fanfare for a new era. Though we had no way of knowing exactly how dark.”
― Steven Hyden, This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century

“For many of the people in my immediate vicinity, it was clear that the Beatles (to say nothing of McCartney’s solo career) ceased to be a going concern once the Summer of Love commenced. Anything in the set list that was even mildly psychedelic—“The Fool on the Hill,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—went over like Timothy Leary at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Apparently, there are still people for whom Sgt. Pepper is a radical—perhaps too radical—musical experiment. This wasn’t a classic-rock-radio crowd, it was an oldies-radio crowd. I, too, was hoping to hear my favorite Beatles hits. But I also secretly wished that McCartney would play “Temporary Secretary,” one of the battiest tracks from one of his battiest solo albums, 1980’s McCartney II. I believe that “Temporary Secretary” is a legitimately great song, even if it is totally bonkers. “Temporary Secretary” sounds like a businessman discussing his staffing practices while also imitating a car alarm. It’s genius! But the main reason I wanted to hear “Temporary Secretary” is because I knew that it would confound all of the boomers in the house who stopped following Paul McCartney’s career after he wrote “Michelle.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The thought of Radiohead trashing a hotel room is like imagining the pope autographing Mother Teresa’s breasts.”
― Steven Hyden, This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century

“McCartney II has similarly attained cult status among indie fans and artists who regard it as forward-thinking avant-electronica. But those people didn’t hear McCartney II in the context in which it was released. The album came out four months after McCartney spent nine days in a Japanese jail for possession of 219 grams of weed while on tour with Wings. The band fell apart after the tour was canceled, prompting McCartney to release his solo recordings as McCartney II. It’s not difficult to understand why McCartney was perceived at the time to be sort of dumb and perpetually stoned, and how this perception influenced the opinion that McCartney II was mere folly, rather than visionary genius. I think the truth about McCartney II is somewhere in the middle. I love the album because the songs are good and weird and utterly unlike anything else in McCartney’s catalog. But I also love it because the dumb/stoned aspects of the record are inextricable from the visionary-genius aspects. McCartney II is good because it’s good, and good because it’s bad.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“For generations of Springsteen fans who have at best problematic relationships with their fathers—I am one of those people—the “And He Said, ‘That’s Good’” speech represents both a fantasy and a surrogate pep talk. Bruce knows what bothers you about the things your real dad won’t say, so here’s a story about his emotionally constipated dad saying the right thing for once.”
― Steven Hyden, There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen's “Born In The U.S.A.” and the End of the Heartland

“On early solo albums like Blizzard of Ozz and 1981’s Diary of a Madman, Ozzy dabbled in cartoon devil worship over the neoclassical guitar wizardry of Randy Rhoads. It was like Van Halen for guys who hated seeing girls at Van Halen concerts. Ozzy even dyed his hair that David Lee Roth shade of blond, but he otherwise kept himself ugly for street-cred purposes.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The albums chart is still expected to be a reliable indicator of what’s happening in pop culture at this very moment. If the chart measured strictly actual album sales, it would be reduced to music that appeals only to people who still buy music. And then we would have to accept that the apotheosis of popular culture is Adele and Christmas records by dorky vocal groups like Pentatonix.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“They are all grown up, but I’ll never see them that way. To me, anyone born the year that Back To The Future came out will always be The People That Are Too Young. I’m not sure when I decided that Michael J. Fox’s entrée to movie stardom was my personal Mendoza line for parsing out the generations. I acknowledge the inherent unreasonableness of my “Back To The Future Rule,” but I’ve been following it too long to stop now. I’m constitutionally unable to take people raised on Stars Wars prequels, Degrassi: The Next Generation, and MTV reality shows seriously, seeing as how they’ve been deprived of the bedrock values and education that you get from the original Star Wars films, the original Degrassi Junior High, and music videos—that’s right, music videos—on MTV.”
― Steven Hyden, Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation?

“This era and the collapse of its bright and flimsy liberation are what the Stones leave behind with the last song of Let It Bleed,” Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone when the album was released. “The dreams of having it all are gone, and the album ends with a song about compromises with what you want—learning to take what you can get, because the rules have changed with the death of the ’60s.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The nature of art is that you take real life and exaggerate and heighten it. You do this to make reality more dramatic and cathartic, and also to remove that toxicity from your head so that it can finally exist outside you as a sovereign entity.”
― Steven Hyden, Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation

“The best of these early albums is 2011’s Twin Fantasy,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock