Creativity Quote by Robert Quine

"I never really followed grunge" lands like a shrug with teeth. Coming from Robert Quine, a guitarist whose DNA runs through punk, no wave, and the jagged downtown New York scene, it’s less an admission of ignorance than a quiet refusal to be drafted into someone else’s decade. The key word is "followed": not "liked" or "respected", but followed, as in joined the line, accepted the memo, moved with the herd. Quine frames grunge as a current you either float along with or resist by instinct.

The subtext is generational but not in the lazy "old guy dismisses new thing" way. Quine’s career was built on taste as a kind of opposition politics - playing with Richard Hell and Lou Reed, valuing abrasion, speed, and unsentimental honesty before alternative rock was a market category. By the time grunge became a mass cultural event, it was already packaged as authenticity: flannel-as-morality, distortion as proof of sincerity. Quine, who lived inside the messier version of that ethos, had little reason to chase a style that turned underground cues into a standardized language.

Context matters: grunge wasn’t just a sound; it was an industry correction after hair metal, a narrative critics could sell and labels could scale. Quine’s line reads like an artist protecting his internal compass from trend pressure. It’s also a subtle critique of music fandom as lifestyle compliance. He’s not claiming superiority; he’s signaling that the point was never to keep up. The most Quine thing about it is its anti-bio: a whole aesthetic stance compressed into nine words.