Pop Culture Quotes

“Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.”
― Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody

“songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.”
― Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

“It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“I blame Doctor Who. Mr Spock. The Scooby Gang: both the ones in the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes. I've spent my life with stories of people who don't walk away, who go back for their friends, who make that last stand. I've been brainwashed by Samwise Gamgee.”
― Andrea K. Höst, Stray

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts Of My Life

“We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn.”
― John Green, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“the problem is, lahat na lang kasi ng pelikula pinipilit gawing pampamilya. one size fits all. kaya tuloy ang material for movies nagiging too mature for kids and too cheesy for adults.”
― Bob Ong, Lumayo Ka Nga Sa Akin

“Those East Coast rich kids are a different breed, on a fast track to nowhere. Your friends in Seattle are downright Canadian in their niceness. None of you has a cell phone. The girls wear hoodies and big cotton underpants and walk around with tangled hair and smiling, adorned backpacks. Do you know how absolutely exotic it is that you haven’t been corrupted by fashion and pop culture? A month ago I mentioned Ben Stiller, and do you remember how you responded? ‘Who’s that?’ I loved you all over again.”
― Maria Semple, Where'd You Go, Bernadette

“A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Pop culture is just a rubik's cube of shit stacked on shit. And it's always turning and you can't figure it out. Ever. Unless you're a tiny Asian boy who can do it SO quickly! Where did this metaphore go? In Kim Kardashian's butt!”
― Grace Helbig

“I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that.
That's why I said I don't like elitism.”
― Haruki Murakami

“I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon.”
― Rachel Cohn, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“Alice is fictional. This isn't.”
― Jess C. Scott, Zombie Mania: A Zombie Apocalypse Parody

“The image of the journalist as wallflower at the orgy has been replaced by the journalist as the life of the party.”
― Nora Ephron, Wallflower at the Orgy

“As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I saw a dark void under the platform and had just enough time to think: "Fuck me he's a earthbender.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground

“Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case "Big Shot" and "Bette Davis Eyes." The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.”
― Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

“Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts—the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish.”
― Adam Rex, Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story

“The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.”
― Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past

“He was a boom boom shake the room " kind of guy”
― Saira Viola, Slide, a Modern Satire on the Excess of Greed

“Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
― Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget

“The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self.”
― Bob Dylan

“On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]”
― Peter O'Donnell

“While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.”
― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“FRUITS AND NUTS


Keep jumping around them like monkeys.
The clones,
Commercialized zombies,
And the TV junkies.
Keep throwing berries,
Twigs,
And nuts at them.
Until they wake up
To see what's up
And figure out why
We're laughing at 'em.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.”
― Jonathan Lethem

“I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a "bad girl." Mariah was a good girl, supposedly Christian, turning very bad, in the late 90's. So then, all the other little girls and teens and women across America thought it would be ok for them to "come out" too essentially, or flaunt whatever they had. Modesty went completely out the window for many women, starting in the late 90's.”
― Lisa Bedrick, On Christian Hot Topics

“Every year, I verify here, alongside the intelligence of the mineral world and the animal kingdom, the proportional stupidity of the human race - the deculturated peasants and acculturated tourists, arrogant adults and children with their pretentious technical gadgetry and senseless chatter. All the other species are more docile and spiritual in their silence than this one.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments