Ian MacKaye Quotes

Skateboarding is not a hobby. And it is not a sport. Skateboarding is a way of learning how to redefine the world around you. For most people, when they saw a swimming pool, they thought, ‘Let's take a swim.' But I thought, ‘Let's ride it.' When they saw the curb or a street, they would think about driving on it. I would think about the texture. I slowly developed the ability to look at the world through totally different means.

An unlocked door means that, occasionally, you might get a devil come in, but a locked door means you have thousands of angels just walk by.

If You Want To Rebel Against Society, Don’t Dull The Blade

I think that people are constantly thinking about capturing things that they're not actually present for the moment they're trying to capture. I'm quite sure of this. I think it's insane how many pictures have to be taken these days. We have to realize there's a level of documentation that's just chatter, it's noise, and beyond that, people who are truly documenting are going to have to find a way to puncture that.

People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?' Here's how I define punk: It's a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It's just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn't being dictated by a profit motive.

Part of the way the work world works is not so much creating a separation between your work and your free time, but creating the illusion of a separation between your work and your free time. Every day is the weekend for me, which means I'm always busy.

I think that the idea of straight edge, the song that I wrote, and the way people have related it it, there's some people who have abused it, they've allowed their fundamentalism to interfere with the real message, which in my mind, was that people should be allowed to live their lives the way they want to.

Every song I ever wrote, I wrote to be heard. So, if I was given a choice that 50 years from now I could either have a dollar or knowing that some kid was listening to my song, I'd go with the kid listening to my song.

That's a Roman concept where the government can do anything, as long as you give the people "bread and circuses." And I'd say this culture right now is similar, as long as people have money, fun, and food, our government can do heinous, heinous things.

Music is a language and different people who come along are each using that language to do something different, but all coming at it in a similar vein inasmuch as it's always community based and for the most part nonprofit. Most bands don't ever come within a mile of profit - clearly these people are not playing music to make money.

At every election, my vote goes to the candidate less likely to declare war. You're dropping hugely expensive pieces of exploding metal on a population. America deserves the president it gets, whether the country votes for them or allows their vote to be stolen, and the least we can do is to elect someone who won't do that to other people.

I just have work to do; I just do it.

We play loud electric guitar music, and we'd hope that that doesn't mean you have to act like an asshole.

American business at this point is really about developing an idea, making it profitable, selling it while it's profitable and then getting out or diversifying. It's just about sucking everything up. My idea was: Enjoy baking, sell your bread, people like it, sell more. Keep the bakery going because you're making good food and people are happy.

There are many things that people do happily that I can't imagine why they would do it... But I have to say that even though I am critical or judgmental of society at large, I'm not critical of people individually. We are who we are.

It's so interesting that humanity has to be defined by emotional strife or something. I don't buy into that.

I never imagine myself as anything. I've never had a goal or any future vision at all. I just do what's in front of me.

I don't think it's an ethical or moral issue, or even that people are stupid, but I do feel like as a culture things are out of balance, perverted, and inverted. Things that are ridiculous are worshipped, and things that are important are ridiculed. I think that's something worth thinking about.

My point of view is, I'm just a person, and there are times when I look at other people and think, 'My God, they spend so much time thinking about things that seem so absurd.' But I'm sure people must think the same thing about me.

The American underground punk scene, though, is a story worth remembering.

I'm always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them.

I've done thousands of interviews in my life, and it's a format that I quite enjoy, because I think of questions in interviews as an opportunity to sort of gauge my growth in a way. It gives me an idea of how I'm navigating this world that I'm in.

I'd much rather talk to a 30-year old that survived rough times in their lives [practicing Straight Edge] rather than someone that was harmed by a culture of violence.

Major labels didn't start showing up really until they smelled money, and that's all they're ever going to be attracted to is money-that's the business they're in- making money.

To me, music is no joke and it's not for sale.

I'm not a religious person, and I'm not too interested in being a part of a religion, but I do like having some sort of communal gathering, and having some sense of peoples.

The fact that the U.S. government spends millions of dollars to send murderous robot planes into other people's land to murder them, into other countries, that's a problem. That's what people should be concerned about. The fact that other people don't understand me is not a problem. I keep things in perspective.

Record labels have enjoyed a 100-year monopoly of selling plastic and now they're up against a different format.

I feel quite connected to the past, and my memory. Everything that I've ever done I can still relate to, and feel connected to it in a way. There's no part of my life that I look at and go, 'I don't recognize that person at all.

Yeah, if someone's selling downloads and collecting money for our songs I would be unhappy about that but if they're trading it I don't mind, obviously if I make a thousand records or CDs or whatever, I like to sell a thousand.

The only thing that drives music is the people who are making it.

I'm not a sports guy. However it's interesting to be in a place where people have a sporting fever. One time I was in Italy during one of the European soccer cups, and it's interesting because it's so electrifying.

With Napster and the sharing of music, of course, there are going to be people who exploit it. Greed has no end. But there's a lot of good that could happen. We shouldn't let the economic concerns of the major labels infringe on our freedom to share music.

People will say "You must miss playing to a thousand people." But I don't. I might miss playing. That's what I would miss, but I don't miss it, because I am playing.

I jump from one thing to the next but try and strike a balance. But it's not nostalgic in the sense of 'those were the good old days and now we're not there'. I don't think like that. Not my way.

Truth is, right now two bombs could drop out of the sky and blow up this house and whatever building you're in and just obliterate Dischord and Pitchfork. And there'll be some people crying, there'll be some slow singing, but for 99% of the world, it won't even affect the fly on their soup. Most of the world never have, or ever will hear of me, Fugazi, or Pitchfork. Right now, someone just got killed in Ukraine. Do you feel any different?

I mean, why do people fight over sports? Because of the framework, the schematic of sports, those particular people seize upon these opportunities to be violent. And the number one problem using the same framework would be religion.

I do feel like I have always, in my life, been inclined to be on the outside, walk a different path or something. Because of that, and increasingly over the years, my sense of distance from mainstream society or from the way culture works, I have a different kind of perception of it.

There are certainly good examples of incredibly brilliant, beautiful music that has been made commercially available and sold everywhere. But I would say that, for the most part, quantity certainly does not speak well for quality.

When people who are songwriters say 'That's my property and if you give it away for free then I'll lose my incentive,' then, well, good riddance.

I never, ever had it in my mind that I wanted to be in the record industry, because I still contend that the record industry is an insidious affair. It's this terrible collision between art and commerce, and it will always be that way.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

I think sometimes my humor is extremely dry, and a lot of times I would say things that I thought were very funny but... I have a reputation of - people think of me as a very fundamentalist, humorless fellow.

Let's say for instance people say, "He's a really totalitarian, strict guy, he's hard to work with or whatever." I don't think it's true, but people's perception of me leads that direction, like I'm a fundamentalist person. I end up having to spend extra time saying, "I'm not a fundamentalist." I have other stuff to do.

Bars are meeting places and places to unwind. But at some point, what is culture unwinding from, and why can't they meet anywhere else?

What does bother me is that I have to spend time and energy dealing with the ramifications of what people do think about me.

1991 for some people was a significant year in terms of punk rock. It was the year "punk broke".

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out in the city. We celebrated Palm Sunday on 14th Street. I have a memory of walking down the street with buildings smoldering, and soldiers and cops everywhere. Anyways, it [St. Stephen’s] was a church that really taught me the things I needed to learn to not go to church. But I think it is a church that does great work, I went to a wedding there three days ago.

You can hear a real shift. You listen to the late 80s recordings, you'll hear us engaging with the audience, dealing with the issues surrounding punk shows at the time. Back then, people thought you had to be a skinhead and beat the crap out of everybody when you went to a punk show. Come the early 90s, when you had this so-called grunge stuff and when videos became so dominant, you had this totally huge shift in the culture of shows.

Getting your letters or pictures digitized. I don't think it's that important. The more you spend on your materials, you're given the sense that those things are more important due to the total amount spent. You'd probably be better off giving that money to a soup kitchen.