Introducing Please Quote Me
We’ve got a new project we’d like to tell you about. It’s called Please Quote Me. The goal is to build an oral history of music and the concept is simple: it’s like Wikipedia for quotes about music. Anyone can sign up and contribute, but the only posts allowed are quotes by musicians about other musicians.
We’ve always been most interested in hearing what true practitioners feel about other artists—not press, or critics, or friends. We wanna know what our creative heroes think about other artists. As Steven Pressfield put it in his book about the creative process, The War of Art:
"The professional senses who has served his time and who hasn’t. Like Alan Ladd and Jack Palance circling each other in Shane, a gun recognizes another gun.”
How it Works
For now there are only two rules to posting:
- Only post quotes by musical artists about other musical artists.
- Quotes must have a link to a source that can be verified (e.g. Youtube video, magazine interview, book, etc.).
We reserve the right to edit or delete any post that doesn’t fit this criteria, and over time we’ll be inviting additional people to help serve as Admins to curate the site.
Better Than Something
This project is a labor of love that was inspired by the punk classic Please Kill Me and an interview with Jay Reatard that appeared in the documentary Better Than Something.
There’s a great scene in Better than Something where Jay starts talking about how he would find out about new bands growing up. He explains that he would just read music magazines and go check out any band that was name-dropped by a band he already liked. That’s how he first found out about The Clean, which became a major influence. So that’s one goal with this project, to be a vehicle for music discovery, like Jay Reatard discovering The Clean.
Please Kill Me
Not only was the name for this project taken from Please Kill Me, it also got us interested in oral history in general. Please Kill Me is an oral history of the early punk scene in downtown New York that centered on CBGB and bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, and The Dictators. Written by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, it’s the best account of that era.
Legs got his start by popularizing the term “punk” as a word to describe the burgeoning genre with his seminal ‘zine Punk. In publishing that magazine he got countless hours of interview tape from many soon-to-be influential artists like the Ramones. It’s these interviews that were used to build the narrative for Please Kill Me, and the result is like reading a play where all of the quotes are real. It’s such a cool way to tell a story.
So, if you like where we’re headed with this project, please sign up and share some quotes. We’ll be curating and featuring an artist profile every month in Original Fuzz Magazine, and we’re going to be applying this format of artists-talking-about-other-artists to our podcast. With your contributions we can make Please Quote Me much bigger, more interesting, and comprehensive that we could ever hope to make it on our own.
The design is still very much a work-in-progress, and we are short on artist profiles right now, but as Reed Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn once said, “If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.”
So sign up, share some quotes, and let us know what you think. What features should we add? What’s confusing? What should we change. We can only do this with your feedback. As Duke Ellington aptly said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” Like the artists featured on Please Quote Me, your opinion is valuable.
