"When I perform, I like to immerse myself in the music, and I just try to get off on the diversity of music"
About this Quote
There’s an unguarded honesty in Novoselic’s phrasing that feels almost defiantly un-rock-star. “Immerse myself” frames performance less as spectacle and more as surrender: the musician dissolving into the sound rather than standing above it. Then he swerves into the wonderfully blunt “get off,” a reminder that for all the mythology around authenticity and angst, playing is also bodily pleasure. It’s a line that punctures the holy seriousness often stapled to guitar culture and replaces it with something more human: curiosity, appetite, joy.
The key word is “diversity,” and it lands with extra weight coming from a figure associated with a band that got canonized as the voice of a specific moment. Nirvana is routinely packaged as a monolith - grunge as aesthetic, grunge as attitude, grunge as diagnosis. Novoselic quietly resists that flattening. He’s describing an inner playlist, not a brand. The subtext is a refusal to be trapped by genre loyalty, the rock-world equivalent of tribal politics. If you’re “getting off” on variety, you can’t really be policed by purists.
Context matters: Novoselic emerged from a scene that prized credibility and distrusted polish, yet he’s not offering a manifesto about integrity. He’s talking about immersion and range - a performer chasing the moment where the room, the band, and the song stop being separate things. In a culture that treats taste like identity, he’s arguing for taste as motion.
The key word is “diversity,” and it lands with extra weight coming from a figure associated with a band that got canonized as the voice of a specific moment. Nirvana is routinely packaged as a monolith - grunge as aesthetic, grunge as attitude, grunge as diagnosis. Novoselic quietly resists that flattening. He’s describing an inner playlist, not a brand. The subtext is a refusal to be trapped by genre loyalty, the rock-world equivalent of tribal politics. If you’re “getting off” on variety, you can’t really be policed by purists.
Context matters: Novoselic emerged from a scene that prized credibility and distrusted polish, yet he’s not offering a manifesto about integrity. He’s talking about immersion and range - a performer chasing the moment where the room, the band, and the song stop being separate things. In a culture that treats taste like identity, he’s arguing for taste as motion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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