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. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
I’m always happy when I hear about people selling records or selling books or selling movies. It makes me proud of them. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
I’ve had people call me from bands that are very popular, and they’re like, ‘What do we do? We want to do what you do.’ It’s almost impossible to do what I do, because you would have to start in 1980. You can’t just do it. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
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. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
The first time I ever recorded, which was into my boom-box, I was like, ‘Wow, check that out.’ It sounded great. The narcotic of it was so intense – it was pleasurable. I was like, ‘You sound like a band.’ Then I ended up spending the rest of my life trying to chase that initial high again. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
And in fact, one of the central reasons why I never got involved with any drugs or anything is that I remember talking to people in maybe 1975 who saw Hendrix but couldn’t remember it. I was like, ‘How could that be?’ Ian MacKaye Read Quote
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. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
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. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
Basically we just created our own label, but again we just did it to document our own music and create our own thing, so the major labels were just always out of our picture, we’re not interested. Ian MacKaye Read Quote
