JELLO BIAFRA QUOTES II

American musician (1958- )

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If we are going to rise above the need for cops and laws, we can quit using the old American work ethic of seeing how much you can get away with and how much you can scam and who cares whose back you stab or what you do to get it as long as you get it.

JELLO BIAFRA

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We on the left keep dividing ourselves into little splinter groups. "Anyone who isn't a vegetarian is automatically evil!" "Anyone who isn't an environmentalist wants to pollute the world!" "If you're not gay, then you must be homophobic!" "Look at me wrong? You're a racist!" "Wear lipstick? You can't be a feminist!" Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide, Divide! And while the left is all up their own a**es with their little pet causes, the right comes in and takes control over that which is rightly everyone's.

JELLO BIAFRA

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I decided I have to hide to write the songs I really, really want to write. And that wound up taking years. And when I came out of my cave, all the musicians I wanted to work with were gone! They were either in bands that they would be fools to leave, who had gotten much bigger by then, or they had developed drug problems or lost interest in music. Or the big bands signed to a major label and then they lost interest in music, and THEN some of them developed drug problems! So all these things kept flipping in and out of my hands. Plus, maybe I had delusions of grandeur, visualising that it would be great to have this person and that person in the band, ignoring the fact that they all lived in different parts of the country, if not across the ocean, and wouldn't necessarily want to move.

JELLO BIAFRA

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People ask where my political views and visions come from. That started practically when I was old enough to walk. We didn't get a TV for a while, but when we did, there was Oswald getting shot, live on TV in the living room. There was the Berlin wall going up, the bloody Vietnam war, Watergate, the race riots started by the police. Network news wasn't so censored then. You would see how badly wounded people where when they took them off the chopper. News wasn't all sanitized like it is today.

JELLO BIAFRA

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But what keeps throwing us back is so much backbiting and gossiping and lying going on; even among the counterculture everybody either wants to be worshipped or be king of the hill. I'm seriously beginning to question whether I've met an honest person in my life.

JELLO BIAFRA

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I always liked playing the villain and the saboteur. Sometimes that even means I sabotage myself, but somehow I'm still here.

JELLO BIAFRA

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Sure, Hillary is no prize, and she marches to Wall Street's drum and always has, but, dammit, she wouldn't be pulling all this doomsday supremacist Christian bigoted racist destroy-the-earth-before-Jesus-comes crap that the Trump people are pulling.

JELLO BIAFRA

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One of the main sources of mental corruption in this country is the ghost of Vince Lombardi: don't matter how you play the game, don't matter if you enjoy the game, don't matter if the game means anything, the important thing is TO WIN. I think that's as good a definition of mental illness as you're ever gonna get.

JELLO BIAFRA

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I don't think the upper 1 or 0.1 percent were ever tearing their hair out about Trump. They were ecstatic that somebody that right-wing, and that bigoted, came with a built-in fan base -- a cult following, even -- that you could never build from scratch with a Jeb Bush or a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio. Behind the scenes, they love this stuff. They think they can get away with so much more.

JELLO BIAFRA

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I'm aware that different people like to listen to music in different ways. But, I'm not going on the internet to listen to demos. The car is the only place for the amateur gong show.

JELLO BIAFRA

Tags: music

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Well, as you might guess, I get some hardline 9/11 conspiracy theorists at my shows. And they are furious with me when I don't devote the whole show to 9/11 conspiracies, and then even more furious when they find out I don't even agree with them. It's like trying to reason with an anti-abortion zealot or an uber-vegan. It's just complete religious fanaticism. Besides, it makes no strategic sense from a military point of view to blow up your most valuable real estate and kill 3,000 of your own people just to launch a war you were going to start anyway. All they would have had to do was stage another attack on a ship like the USS Cole, or better yet, do it all at the special effects department at Fox News, and we would be stuck in Iraq anyway.

JELLO BIAFRA

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We don't need a flat tax, but a flattening tax, to truly level the playing field.

JELLO BIAFRA

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I was seven years old and my father was trying to get me to shut up and go to bed. He was trying to find something on the radio to put me to sleep and accidentally came across a rock station -- I think it was KIMN in Denver. Suddenly, I was like, 'No! No! Leave it there! I like this!' After that, there was no stopping me.

JELLO BIAFRA

Tags: rock 'n' roll

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My parents made the decision not to hide reality from the kids. If that came on the news while we were eating dinner, they didn't jump up and change the channels to some whitebeard sitcom. It was discussed with the kids at a very early age. Early on, I had very strong views about wars, corruption, and what is now called environmentalism.

JELLO BIAFRA

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Lower the Voting Age to Five. See youth apathy magically turn around when they know they have a real stake in their future; and get to vote for their school boards, and why not their teachers?

JELLO BIAFRA

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I have no average day. I have no free time. I have no hobbies. I live through my obsessions.

JELLO BIAFRA

Tags: obsession

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"Buy my soda!" said the Moose Diarrhea Salesman. And we did. We all did. But when we got it home and opened up the package, it was not what they said it was. And rather than chucking it all and searching for something better, we're content with looking for another Moose Diarrhea Salesman.

JELLO BIAFRA

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