Greil Marcus

"Complete freedom meant — no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy. Not the sense that when I leave my work for my family, and bring my family to a Sunday in the park, my leisure feels like work. Not this mad conviction that I’m a stranger in my own home town, that at work I feel like a machine, that in the park I feel like an advertisement, that at home I feel like a tourist."

"...as I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K."–a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets–I AM AN ANTICHRIST–Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today–listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang–my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat."

"Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled."

"While it's well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to one's very existence, it's generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so. (emphasis in the original)"

"The moments of perfect pleasure in Johnson's songs, and the beauty of those songs, remind one that it is not the simple presence of evil that is unbearable; what is unbearable is the impossibility of reconciling the facts of evil with the beauty of the world."

"Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music."

"Dylan weiß so viel wie kaum ein anderer über die alte Musik Amerikas. Er verfügt über unfassbar viel Detailwissen, vor allem aber ist sein Wissen geerdet. Das war von Anfang an der Unterschied zwischen ihm und all den anderen Folksängern, zu denen er ja gehörte."