I was a pretty nice kid. Kind of quiet, but quiet in terms I wasn’t going out and setting fire to anything. I had a big mouth and I was creative type, you know.
Miami’s not anybody’s poor cousin. It’s an aspiration to live in this town, not something you have to do to promote yourself like some of the larger cities.
When punk began to be a genre, people were going to go out and try to mine it. Some of the better groups, like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, were very artificial.
I’m not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don’t get “Iggy Sings.” I am also a style of music, an approach.
The most successful stuff is sold to you as indispensable social information. The message in the music is, ‘We are terribly, terribly slick and suave, and if you listen to us, you can probably get a leg up in society, too.’
I spent most of the eighties, most of my life, riding around in somebody else’s car, in possession of, or ingested of, something illegal, on my way from something illegal to something illegal with many illegal things happening all around me
There are no pimps, no whores, no transvestites – gone. Now that’s more the culture I’m comfortable in … I don’t like it in the house, you know what I mean, but I like it somewhere around.
My general take on American music since 1969 is that it’s just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight – audience, performance, and palace guard.
