Mainstream Culture Quotes

#1. I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

Colin Meloy

#2. Mainstream culture is like your mom: It's always a little late to catch on and gets easily confused by technology, but it means well.

Chris Hardwick

#3. And the thing about nerd culture being mainstream culture now means that there's no place to just be a nerd among other nerds - without being reminded that you're the nerd.

Rainbow Rowell

#4. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

Bob Dylan

#5. A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex.

Neil Tennant

#6. Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it

Thurston Moore

#7. I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

Steve Albini

#8. What stands out to me in America was all the police vs. citizens turmoil. It's decades of bad policing, bad schooling, racism, bigotry and other factors finally spilling into mainstream culture. I would like to see America evolve on how the laws are enforced on the streets.

Henry Rollins

#9. The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.

David Brooks

#10. I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution.

John Gierach

#11. In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn't complacent, it's stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That's not wimpy - it's powerful and productive.

Michael Azerrad

#12. Rock in the mainstream culture has lost a lot of its mojo.

Billy Corgan

#13. To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

Keegan-Michael Key

#14. Countercultural liberties can open pathways to well-being that aren't recognized by mainstream culture - but can also result in a reckless disregard for self and others.

Ken Goffman

#15. I think [audiences are] more aware now of the contradictions in mainstream culture, the phony piety that permeates society, the inhumane hypocrisy.

Paul Krassner

#16. Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time.

Stephen Marche

#17. The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.

Graham Joyce

#18. I think Edward Sharpe's music is counter-cultural music in the strangest sense where you have a time now where love, optimism, hope and community are uncool and not part of the mainstream culture.

Alex Ebert

#19. If mainstream culture thinks gender roles are unimportant, church culture makes them too important.

Katelyn Beaty

#20. I'm glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago.

Alison Bechdel

#21. In the 21st century men's tits have not just rivalled but replaced women's as the touchstone of 'sexy' in mainstream pop culture, even when the audience for them is other men.

Mark Simpson

#22. While mainstream media is led by profit, ratings and popularist culture and filtered by the current political climate, Alternative Media is lead solely by the convictions of the campaign and film maker.

Ben Edwards

#23. When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.

John Cusack

#24. Stepping aside from the culture of opinion, delving deeper into open-minded analysis, critics might fulfill their most important function: locating major works that are not always visible in mainstream networks.

Stephen J. Burn

#25. People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Jess C. Scott

#26. I believe prayer for our nation has never been more important as we witness an accelerating anti-Christian fervor in the so-called mainstream of our culture.

Jonathan Falwell

#27. I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors.

Laura Owens

#28. Trans stories have now entered the mainstream in this fantastic way, but the most important thing is what follows from that is hopefully a shift in the experience of trans people - so that there's more acceptance in the culture to the issues they face and more support.

Tom Hooper

#29. I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

Kevin Smith

#30. It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies.

Iris Chang

#31. Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.

Thurston Moore

#32. It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

George Carlin

#33. When it comes to the culture, there's no such thing as peaceful coexistence. If we're not defending truth, fighting for Christian values in all of life, the truth will be sacrificed on the altar of mainstream secularism.

Charles Colson

#34. Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes.

Kristen Bell

#35. For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.'

Jose Antonio Vargas

#36. Be out of the mainstream. I'm out of the mainstream. I enjoy it, who wants to be in the mainstream?

Bill Maher

#37. I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

Lauren Greenfield

#38. The mainstream of literary culture in the U.K. is very averse to writing about technology.

Nick Harkaway

#39. It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else.

Walter Kirn

#40. Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here.

Michelle Shocked

#41. I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream. It's not an underground tool for me. It's my whole life.

Lady Gaga

#42. In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#43. Because of my New Line upbringing, half my heart goes to scrappy independents, and half goes to mainstream, down-the-middle pop culture events. And even with those, to try to keep something fresh and original with them and try to do things that the majors miss.

Michael De Luca

#44. 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