“It’s a make-it-or-break-it period for us. We do the right thing, we’ll be able to pull into the 21st century with some kind of program. We do the wrong thing, the 21st century is going to be gone, there’ll be no coming back”

“John Lennon held out hope. He imagined, and however quietistic he became he never lost that utopian identification. But when you hold out hope, people get real disappointed if you can’t deliver.”

“Can I possibly believe that this deliberately barbaric sometime poet and her glorified garage band are worthy of comparison with Rimbaud, Jarry, Tzara, Gide, Mondrian? The short version of my answer is yes”

“Hooks are what makes DJs and listeners remember a record. Elton’s gift for the hook is so universal that there is small likelihood that one of them hasn’t stuck in your pleasure center. Or your craw”

“Sinatra remained white America’s last completely satisfying definition of masculine style — to somewhat disconcerting effect, let me add”

“Here at last was art with access to a contemporary, white, English-speaking proletarian culture. It pos­ited kids whose very determination to survive took guts and whose unwillingness to give up the idea of victory was positively heroic”

“We don’t have to bow our heads in shame because this is the best album of 1975. It would have been the best album of 1967, too”

“Hell really was the quintessential avant-punk. With no more irony than was mete, he presented his nihilistic narcissism not as youthful hijinx but as a full-fledged philos­ophy/aesthetic”

"The Beasties are still bad — they get laid, they do drugs, they break laws, they laze around. But this time they know the difference between bad and evil.”

“I am, or have been, a certified Grateful Dead freak; I don’t know how many Dead concerts I’ve attended, but it has to be more than 25, which for this record addict is a record. What’s more, I never made a conscious decision to lay off.”