No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to.

Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

Do we really want to know how Michael Jackson makes his music? No. We want to understand why he needs the bones of the Elephant Man -- and, until he tells us, it doesn't make too much difference whether or not he really is ''bad.''

A drug is neither moral nor immoral -- it's a chemical compound. The compound itself is not a menace to society until a human being treats it as if consumption bestowed a temporary license to act like an asshole.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

The manner in which Americans ''consume'' music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline -- it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.