Home > Work > Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
1 " It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith. "
― Steve Almond , Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us
2 " Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred. "
3 " There is no sin in the realm of taste. "
4 " All language is an aspiration to music. "
5 " This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth. "
6 " Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be. "
7 " This is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose. They make us feel specific things we might never have felt otherwise. Every time I listen to "Sunday Bloody Sunday," for instance, I feel a pugnacious righteousness about the fate of the Irish people. I hear that thwacking military drumbeat and Bono starts wailing about the news he heard today and I'm basically ready to enlist in the IRA and stomp some British Protestant Imperialist Ass, hell yes, bring on the fucking bangers and mash and let's get this McJihad started. "
8 " The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language. "
9 " When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they’re mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What "
10 " We live in a society that puts a high premium on success and I learned, mainly through my dad, that salvation would come through success, and I carried that into my adult life and it’s a total lie. "
11 " I myself despise “Macarena,” and yet I have been humming it for the past three days and my two-year-old daughter is now humming it and I’m pretty sure she will never stop. "
12 " If you’re wondering if you’re a collector, ask yourself two questions. Do I own too many records? Do my friends and family feel I own too many records? If your respective answers are No and Yes, you’re a Collector. "
13 " it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet and "
14 " The record is not simply a storage device. Its value resides in the particular set of memories and emotional associations held by its owner. These are inseparable from the physical object, which is no longer a physical object but an article of faith. "
15 " Boyle looked like a Monty Python in drag. Then she opened her mouth and this epic noise came ripping out of her. Within a week, she was the most celebrated person on earth, an "
16 " Styx has become the mullet of bands. "
17 " But here’s a little secret, between you, me, and the rest of the mall: buying shit isn’t enough. What we wish for in our secret hearts is self-expression, the chance to reveal ourselves and to be loved for this revelation, devoured by love. And thus, most of us go about our duties of commerce and leisure in a state of perpetual longing, with nocturnal excursions into the province of despair. "
18 " music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch. "
19 " Hey, Dad, check this out!” Ike stared at the boy. He clearly wanted to be down there watching his kid possibly crack his skull open, rather than recording a song about how frightened he was that his kids might crack their skulls open. "
20 " Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less precious in the bargain. I "