American musician (1940–1993)
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Failure is one of those things that 'serious people' dread. Invariably, the persons most likely to be crippled by this fear are people who have convinced themselves that they are SO bitchen they shouldn't ever be placed in a situation where they might fail.
Failure is nothing to get upset about. It's a fairly normal condition; an inevitability in ninety-nine percent of all human undertakings. Success is rare — that's why people get so cranked up about it.
I feel a lot of people don't know what high school is - including those who are in it. My material is provided to give them some perspective. People are stupid. They never stop to question things. They just accept. Can you imagine a nation who never questions the validity of cheerleaders and pom-poms?
"I detest love lyrics. I think one of the causes of bad mental health in the United States is that people have been raised on 'love lyrics'.
You're a young kid and you hear all those 'love lyrics', right? Your parents aren't telling you the truth about love, and you can't really learn about it in school. You're getting the bulk of your 'behaviour norms' mapped out for you in the lyrics to some dumb fucking love song. It's a subconscious training that creates desire for an imaginary situation which will never exist for you. People who buy into that mythology go through life feeling that they got cheated out of something.
What I think is very cynical about some rock and roll songs — especially today — is the way they say: "Let's make love." What the fuck kind of wussy says shit like that in the real world? You ought to be able to say "Let's go fuck", or at least "Let's go fill-in-the-blank" — but you gotta say "Let's make love" in order to get on the radio. This creates a semantic corruption, by changing the context in which the word 'love' is used in the song.
When they get into drooling about love as a 'romantic concept' — especially in the lyrics of sensitive singer/songwriter types — that's another shove in the direction of bad mental health.
Fortunately, lyrics over the last five or six years have gotten to be less and less important, with 'art rock groups' and new wavers specializing in 'nonjudgemental' or 'purposely inconsequential' lyrics. People have stopped listening to the lyrics — they are now only 'pitched mouth noises'."
Just because somebody hears something you say, or reads something that you write, doesn’t mean you’ve reached them. With reading comprehension being what it is in the U. S., you can safely toss that one out the window. If you want to judge by the listening habits of people who buy records, the first thing they do is put it on and talk over it.
The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own”
“Stupidity has a certain charm - ignorance does not”
“My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can”
“It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralize the long-range effects of our national stupidity”
“Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.