If you get right up next to a screen window, you can see all kinds of colors through each hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be reduced to one color per hole. That is what digital recording does to sound. All that gets recorded is what’s dominant at the moment. I would like to hear guitars again, with the warmth, the highs, the lows, the electricity, the vibrancy of “something that’s real”, instead of just a duplication of the dominant factors. It’s an insult to the brain and heart and feelings to have to listen to this and think it’s music
Neil Young, 1992
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone
Patti Smith
