Popular Music Quotes

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

Never sound pompous. You always sound noble, noble. Absolute character of music is nobility. Even popular music can be noble, you see. If it's not noble, then it's not very good... Music is an art of emotion, of nobility, of dignity, of greatness, of love, of tenderness. All that must be brought out in music but never a show of pompousness.

We were working in entertainment, in the music industry, with popular music, it was important, but it was something that we also felt was a responsibility.

Rock musicians, and a vast array of popular-music musicians, due to their wealth, acquired through the mass of their notoriety, are able to be listened to and heard and thus are able to effect change on an international level.

Popular music is like a big party, and it’s a thrill sneaking in rather than being invited. Every once in a while, a guy with his shirt on inside out, wearing lipstick and a pillbox hat gets a chance to speak.

There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land.

The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did.

I have found myself deeply, deeply intrigued by the ska-punk scene. It's such an expressive form of popular music, it's so real, it's got so much life: it's the most vital music in the world.

Bill Withers, Van Morrison and Marvin Gaye are pioneers in popular music for the last century, and these are people who have influenced me as well, so it's pretty flattering. I've got a long way to go to reach anywhere near what those guys have done. But it's a good encouragement.

Popular music is all about traveling at the speed of you and elevating the individual as the highest thing in the world.

Advice to rock gods: drugwise, stick to Ibuprofen, decaf lattes, and pale Pilsners ... If your stomach is not a flat slab, please leave your shirt on while performing ... If your girlfriend asks you to choose between her and your music, sell your instruments immediately - especially if you're a drummer ... Finally, go easy on the supermodels, don't forget to tune, and remember: a tiny bit of dry ice and lasers goes a long way. Ditto with tattoos.

I turn on the radio now and I don't have anything against a lot of sequenced and programmed and electronic music, a lot of it is dope and it's the future. It's what popular music has evolved to.

I found myself thinking about the distance between the 60s and today through certain moments. Like the Henry Flynt interview with Ubuweb founder Kenny Goldsmith, where he talks about how he was scarred by how proud John Cage was to be ignorant of popular music. Goldsmith says, "Nobody thinks twice nowadays about listening to everything!" Something that had seemed so uniquely, radically syncretistic in Flynt's day seems much more commonplace now.

[Europe has] this tradition of self revelation in popular music. We have it here - it's called Country Western Music... I think that's where the deeper and more complex subjects are treated.

We had various kinds of tape-recorded concerts and popular music. But by the end of the flight what we listened to most was Russian folk songs. We also had recordings of nature sounds: thunder, rain, the singing of birds. We switched them on most frequently of all, and we never grew tired of them. It was as if they returned us to Earth.

For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer.

I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.

Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.

Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

There is no essential difference between classical and popular music. Music is music. I want to communicate with the listener who finds Indian classical music remote.

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

Music documentaries are hard to tell, but I think they're an amazing vehicle to look at racism, our attitude to sex, the way we judge drugs. There's the ability to get a big audience because of these incredible, iconic, charismatic people. You can look at a number of issues - the challenge is to make sure you choose something that has all those issues. Popular music is like a mirror of culture, of who we are.

Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel. They'd be strange teenagers if they didn't. But cross-pollinating happens too - Aphex Twin did more interesting things with electronic music than most trained composers, who seemed to approach samplers with undue caution and reverence in those early days.

Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music.

James Brown and Frank Sinatra are two different quantities in the universe. They represent two different experiences of the world.

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.

After people like Lennon and Dylan, I think David Bowie brought a very modernistic intelligence and the necessity for change. I think he was completely positive, certainly through one and a half decades of completely overriding influence, in the best of popular music, and I take my bloody hat off to him!

Popular music of the last 50 years has failed to keep in step with advances in musical theater, namely Stephen Sondheim. But the two have grown apart so that popular music is based more than ever on a rhythmic grid that is irrelevant in musical theater. In popular music, words matter less and less. Especially now that it's so international, the fewer words the better. While theater music becomes more and more confined to a few blocks in midtown.

The first time I started choreographing was in the dark, in my living room, with the lights completely out, to some popular music on the radio. I put the radio on full blast and I started moving. I didn't know what it looked like. I didn't want to see it... I had to start in the dark.

Soul was the music made by and for black people. For most of the Sixties it was thoroughly divorced from white popular music, but by the end of the decade several artists with their roots firmly in both soul and R&B traditions had crossed over.

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana.

All the forms of popular music from jazz to hip-hop, to bebop, to soul [come from black innovation]. You talk about different dances from the catwalk, to the jitterbug, to the Charleston, to break dancing -\-\ all these are forms of black dancing...What would [life] be without a song, without a dance, and joy and laughter, and music.

I'm into old-time music, I'm not very interested in modern, popular music at all. And if I'm really into some particular old-time musician, some fiddler or banjo player, I'm always dying of curiosity to see what they look like.

Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Band Aid was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.

Explicit material is available in a variety of forums - from popular music to television to the Internet.

The country experience was more of a departure. When you consider my education and my upbringing, you can see that was more of country rock outgrowth of my popular music aspirations.

Popular music is slowly being laid to rest in every conceivable way... the ashes are already about us if we could but notice them.

I fell into hip-hop right from the beginning. I was a teenager in the '60s, so I was putting all my pocket money into buying LPs. I followed the ascent of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder. I followed popular music very closely, and I've never stopped.

I remember when I was very young, I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said, 'You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly.

In the United States, many people said you can't have folk music in the United States because you don't have any peasant class. But the funny thing was, there were literally thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who loved old time fiddling, ballads, banjo tunes, blues played on the guitar, spirituals and gospel hymns. These songs and music didn't fit into any neat category of art music nor popular music nor jazz. So gradually they said well let's call it folk music.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals

Keith Richards is the only man who can make the Osbournes look Amish.

Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.

Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today; it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down.

....the popular music of Jamaica, the music of the people, is an essentially experiential music, not merely in the sense that the people experience the music, but also in the sense that the music is true to the historical experience, that the music reflects the historical experience. It is the spiritual expression of the historical experience of the Afro-Jamaican.

I think there's a weird self-affirmation thing that happens in popular music in general. It seems like every song I hear on the radio is like, "Listen to me roar!" or "This is my fight song!"

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.