The negative effects of celebrity

"People of extreme celebrity are a payday for paparazzi. They don’t care about the person as long as they get paid. I feel nothing but sorry for Britney Spears because not only does she have to deal with all that bullshit but she also has regressive stuff like her parents complaining to the paparazzi to leave her alone- yet these are the same people who pushed her into the Mickey Mouse Club and gave her breast implants at age 16. Stop telling me you are not about your daughter’s well-being. Meanwhile she has an entire support system of people behind her that need her for their job. If she stops working they stop getting paid, and they are terrified about that. Every artist is used like that. I did a tour in ’99 and I couldn’t even talk at the end. I had to have surgery on my voice but since we were on tour and had the number one album and went platinum. Immediately it was like ‘sorry. Bite the bullet, buddy.’ No one even fucking gives a shit. If they can find someone that looked like me and sings like me, I’m sure they would’ve used them."

The music industry

"I am loving that the music industry has basically been its own doom- which is awesome. But I have always been perplexed that, in this industry, the artist is the low man on the totem pole. Yet, for every artist, there are ten people employed and of those artists maybe 7% are really successful; then you have your in between artists that get long, decent careers but are not massively wealthy; and then your bands that scrape by. Up until recently you had a mechanism acting that was signing bands to contracts with the highest interest rates of anything you could ever imagine in the history of humanity, and masses of infrastructures employing people in such a way that the artist is almost relegated to the most inconsequential part of the equation. Because of that sort of power perceived by them (particularly in the late ‘80s and ‘90s) they started to decide they can choose which band to put the machine behind and make successful. It became more prevalent as they thought they had more power. It became about market and not the songs. Of course it caved in because the internet is taking all that and just giving it to people. By December iTunes will be the number one retailer over Wal-Mart and Best Buy. The industry has dug their own grave and I don’t care."

Having a manic attack

"Imagine the one thing in the world that you are the most afraid of; multiply it by a thousand; put yourself in a coffin buried under the ground with it; and then imagine the coffin is shrinking. That probably doesn’t even really describe one. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy. If there was a way someone could make it into a torture technique, I’m sure they would."

Go back to listen to his music
Visit his website at www.matthewgood.org.