Kevin Craft > Quotes

“Being a nerd is about being so uncool that embracing one’s inner weirdo and showcasing that personality to the world without fear of repercussion is the only tenable path for achieving peace of mind. It involves dropping all pretense and attempts to construct a socially normal personality. It’s about letting the kooky shine through.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Because the pop culture produced in the years between Gulf War I and the mid-1990s is so markedly different from that of any other era in American history, the period is often misunderstood and treated like an ugly stepchild of cultural history.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“If you can’t beat ‘em or join ‘em, just be yourself.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“What’s interesting about craft brewers’ proclivity for such elaborate exercises in branding is how this behavior so closely resembles the longstanding practices of the global beer conglomerates craft beer folk claim to despise. There’s an old and telling adage about business that says mass market companies, take Budweiser and MillerCoors for example, don’t sell products, they sell advertising.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Cobain’s death blurred the lines between art and reality in a very uncomfortable way—suddenly all the references to guns and self-loathing seemed like thinly veiled cries for help from an individual in distress rather than profound artistic statements.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“bands who fall in the virtuosic camp made music that was well-received at the time of its release, while the bands that always favored raw sounds tend to enjoy more critical acclaim when viewed in retrospect.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Real nerds can be best identified by the way they unabashedly showcase the weird obsessions that are found in every person’s individual mind. We are all captivated with random things that defy explanation. Only nerds air these obsessions out in the open without reservation.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“As the decade progressed, Americans, in lockstep with Fukuyama’s predictions, became more and more obsessed with resolving technical problems and satiating consumer desires.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“the very practice of dividing history in terms of decades is intrinsically flawed. And yet this particular practice is still, in many ways, the best method available for understanding cultural history.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“There’s another way to understand Fukuyama’s boredom with history’s end: success breeds its own type of sadness. Once a goal is achieved or an adversary vanquished, the victor’s sense of purpose becomes less relevant. The import of future endeavors begins to lack the significance of what has already been achieved. And that’s always a depressing state of affairs.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“But the move also erased the physical barriers (the dirty clubs and dingy record stores) that helped draw the lines between authentic music that sought to do more than turn a profit and commercial dross. All music suddenly came from the same space: the vast and mysterious online realm.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“And Weezer’s staying power on the rock scene is a testament to their superior virtuosity and exemplary songwriting abilities. In the aftermath of the group’s debut album, Rivers Cuomo turned inwards and penned what would become the divisive Pinkerton, a caustic, grungy album whose naked declarations of personal angst made it a favorite of over-programmed high school students and helped inspire the Emo boom that would crest in the early 2000s.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Once virtually every song produced[22] was available at the click of a mouse (via legitimate purchase or more nefarious means), music lost some of the power it had long held as a marker of selfhood. It became just another product that could be downloaded in the privacy of one’s own home, not something that was easily trotted out as a symbol of the buyer’s tastes and beliefs. That didn’t mean music was ever in danger of disappearing from the culture entirely; it just meant that it would no longer be much use to people obsessed with not only finding examples of authentic self-expression but letting every person they came in contact with know that authenticity was integral to their conception of self.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“That same year Cobain committed suicide, and Gen X lost its greatest talisman. Cobain’s death blurred the lines between art and reality in a very uncomfortable way—suddenly all the references to guns and self-loathing seemed like thinly veiled cries for help from an individual in distress rather than profound artistic statements.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“The guitars ramble forward at a saturnine pace, enticing the listener to sway back and forth rather than dance or mosh or hop around like a jackass who’s ingested copious amounts of crack.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“What exactly was grunge? That’s a question any person who’s thought about early ‘90s rock music has asked themselves at one point or another. Was it a scene or a musical style? A fashion category? A marketing ploy? A political bent? An ethos? Is the word synonymous with “alternative,” the other descriptor regularly applied to early ‘90s rock?”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“There’s a scene in the film Reality Bites, which with all due respect to The Big Chill and The Best Years of Our Lives is the quintessential example of what results when Hollywood distills the perceived ideals of a generation into a cohesive narrative product, when Ethan Hawke’s über-slacker protagonist Troy Dyer mocks mineral water.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“When a comprehensive history of the early twenty-first century is written, the first three chapters will inevitably focus on the newfound ubiquity of bespoke food. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser will be remembered as the gifted visionaries who correctly identified Americans propensity for noshing on the factory-to-table fare peddled by multinational food conglomerates as the reason so many of us are fat, sick, and nearly dead. Today, every enlightened urban dweller accepts such reasoning as gospel. Our problems as a people originate not from who we are or what we aspire to be, but from what we eat. Or so says the trendsetting subclass known as foodies.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“The denudation of authentic self-expression from popular music created the cultural vacuum which foodiesm now occupies. Foodies have become the natural heirs to the counterculture mantle. They proudly wear authenticity and DIY badges even as their interests trend towards the gastronomic rather than the aural. Authenticity in food is now the province of those who self-identify as genuine and who preach the gospel of anti-corporate self-expression.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“It would have taken a lot more courage—yes courage—than any of us could muster to formulate a cohesive mission statement explaining what we stood for and how we planned to achieve it. Our parents’ reasons for asking us to achieve gainful employment and consume were not reasons we had the intellectual capacity to discount. We had no great war and no great depression to blame for our feelings of inadequacy.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Mankind’s ideological evolution remained stagnant, but as the novelty of this realization war off, the need to pronounce the sadness of this state of affairs through culture went by the wayside.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey

“Early nineties youth culture transformed teenage wasteland into a landscape defined by introspection and an undeniable strand of fatalism regarding the entrenched nature of greed within American society. Unlike previous youth movements—the Beatniks, flower children, and punks—Xers did not express a desire to start anew or adopt an overtly confrontational pose towards mainstream culture. They traded clarion calls to action for shrug of the shoulder acceptance, defiance for apathy.”
― Kevin Craft, Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey