If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.

The politics of rock 'n' roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom 'n' Daddy's living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once if only then in your life you were blasted out of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.

You have to understand that my area of expertise is in music. For me to step outside of that area and make comments on social issues or political issues is crazy. Don't listen to me, because I honestly believe that people should look to higher sources than entertainers for their political beliefs. And whenever I hear people do that, you know, it irritates the fuck out of me, because I can't stand it, to hear some rock'n'roller or pseudo-rock'n'roller talking about how the world should run. Like, what do you know? You can't even write a good song, you think I should listen to you about who I should vote for? That's insane.

[Rock 'n' roll] really is not given to thinking — and resents thinking. Which I believe is the big error of rock 'n' roll. It's always aspired to be the music of the working class. And it's never been looked upon as a vocabulary for art and artistic thinking... We have to be able to expand the vocabulary to express more complex thoughts.

My aversion from music rests on political grounds.

Rock stars suck. Man, I'd be so embarrassed at being called a rock star. A lot of those connotations aren't conductive to my lifestyle. I don't do drugs, I don't fuck groupies, I don't spend all my money on limos and mansions and cocaine. I have a car and a small house and I go on tour and go to bed early and wake up and have tea. I'm a worker, man. I don't think many people see me as a rock star; hopefully they see me as a normal person. 'Musician' would be just fine.

Christians shouldn't be allowed near rock and roll. It's not for them! It's not fucking for them! They should all join the Brothers of the Beige or some fucking thing - "The Beige Sisters of Premenstrual Agony." The fucking...! You see them - Christian rock! Is there such a fucking absurdity in the world? [makes screeching noises imitating a metal guitar, then speaks quietly] "He is my saviour!" That's not rock and roll! That's Youth Club Table Tennis fucking crap! Rock and roll is [shrieking] "I AM THE DEVIL AND I WANNA FUCK YOUR MOTHER!"

On media consideration to be a reluctant rock star: I'm not a reluctant rock star, I am not one at all. I haven't an ounce of rock star in me. [...] What I despise about the rock star lifestyle is the lack of music in it. The average day is spent travelling to hotels, giving interviews, being nice to people you're told to be nice to, and maybe if you're lucky you might squeeze a bit of music in. The musician's day is music. [...] I am in that unique little club, where I went into music because I love music, not because I wanted to be rich and famous. I've always knocked on the door of the musicians' room, not the rock stars' room. The British press refuses to see the difference between them, mainly because of the capers of people like Phil Collins, a musician who behaves like a rock star. But there are people who love music and have no interest in being a rock star at all.

Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.

I want to give a serious message in the pop music. Right now, I think most of the rock and roll music - they just don't want touch this. You know, they think this is not fashion anymore. And that the young people will think this not cool. I think this a part of rock and roll music - good melody, good energy, and good message.

The rock and roll business is pretty absurd, but the world of serious music is much worse.

If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.

The more info I read, the more the Rock & Roll hall of fame seems anti-rock. Rock was not meant to be judged by panels of old people.

One of our big conversations that we always have in this band is, we don't see rock & roll as being about coke-taking, leather-trouser-wearing rebellion, because that to us is not rebellion anymore. The spirit of rock & roll is freedom. It's about following what you believe in and not caring what anyone else says. And if that means writing something on your hand, then you've got to write something on your hand. It doesn't matter if you don't look as cool as the Ramones - you're never going to, anyway. So I know that we'll be ridiculed for this and look stupid for that. But as long as we believe in what we're doing, we can't apologize for it.