Quotes By Ian MacKaye

I feel completely fortunate to have this outlet for something I don't really feel like I have a choice in, to make music. I've got to make 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.

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.

I work so I don't need to make rent through my songs, and I think if more people engaged with music without needing it to provide for their welfare, you're not beholden to anyone.

My focus is always on the day. What I've done behind me, I try to have respect for it, and keep an eye on it, and make sure it isn't abused, and obviously be thoughtful about it, because it's all real to me. I'm basically in every band I ever was in, and the songs, I still mean them all.

I consider the piano my 'main' instrument and have been playing for as long as I can remember. It seems to me that I might have come up with something resembling a song as early as 4 or 5 years old.

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 don't dismiss the music that I was involved with, I don't think it was a joke, I don't think it was funny or a phase, I don't think it was just something I was doing back then, to me it was who I am. It connects all the way through. I don't distance myself from any of it.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

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.

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.

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 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.'

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.

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.

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?'

What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.

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 just have work to do; I just do it.

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.

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.

When children start to speak they find their own voice by imitating the sounds around them. It would follow that bands do the same. Bands will find their own voice at some point.

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.

I have thousands of tapes, and photos and fliers, letters, posters, artwork - basically everything that ever happened, I kept. I'm not a hoarder, though. I'm sort of a librarian.

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

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.

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.

The thing is, people can't complain about profit-oriented moves if they're only interested in profit themselves. You can't have it both ways. If they're willing to polish up a gift and sell it to make money, they can't really complain about the fact that somebody above them has sold them down the river. That's the way it goes.

Ultimately, I'm not the most prolific person, but I've been doing this for a long time, and I keep on putting out music. The only thing that drives music is the people who are making it.

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.