Quotes About Mainstream Music

#1. I didn't grow up watching TV or going to McDonald's or listening to mainstream music. Like, the casting agents are looking elsewhere for the cheerleader role.

Summer Phoenix

#2. I grew up singing ballads, but what I really wanted to get into was the mainstream music on the radio because I really love the beats and everything.

Jessica Sanchez

#3. Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music.

Ice Cube

#4. I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it.

Steve Albini

#5. I would love to hear all types of Christian artists played all over the world. I'd love to hear good, positive mainstream music played all over the place. I'd love to be able to bring music together. But I have not deserted Christ. I have not deserted my faith.

Stacie Orrico

#6. Pitbull is great with brands. Endorsements with hip-hop artists work because hip-hop artists typically set the most trends ... It's every brand's goal to be seen in the mainstream, and hip-hop music has become mainstream music.

Adam Kluger

#7. I want to be enriched by the music I listen to. That's the reason it never really exists in the mainstream. Because that's not what most people are after.

Conor Oberst

#8. Electronic music is really weird right, because it is bleeding into the mainstream, but, at the same time, it's fashion.

Nigel Godrich

#9. Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it

Thurston Moore

#10. The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.

Ian Schrager

#11. Surf music at the time that I did it wasn't mainstream, nor were the Cheech and Chong albums. The risk comes from having the ability to do something that hadn't been done before that I thought was either interesting as an art form or just should be done.

Lou Adler

#12. There's not a lot of pop music in the mainstream that makes you feel scared, that makes you wonder what's happening.

Prince

#13. Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now.

Bob Dylan

#14. Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public.

Patti Smith

#15. Basically the subcultures formed in the U.K. because the mainstream was not satisfying the needs of certain people like myself. So through music and through style, we found our tribe, we found like-minded rebels.

Don Letts

#16. I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out.

Thom Yorke

#17. I don't care what's happening in the mainstream of country music. I haven't in a long time.

Steve Earle

#18. Dance music has pushed its way into the mainstream. Which is good for me.

Jessie Ware

#19. My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.

Jessica Sanchez

#20. I'm very fussy about how my records sound, but I'm very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don't do it that way.

Nick Lowe

#21. 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.

Thurston Moore

#22. American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.

Cornel West

#23. I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

Nigel Kennedy

#24. I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted.

Pat Metheny

#25. That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

John R. Rickford

#26. Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's.

Nina Blackwood

#27. I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just

Billy Corgan

#28. Because people love music, I feel it's my responsibility to produce more of the music and to get it out to more people, so like I said, If the mainstream route does that without compromising me being happy as a person then that's something I'll do.

Jhene Aiko

#29. I think I fall into a lot of cracks in terms of I'm too something. I'm too this, I'm too that. And my music has never really had a home. I've been this floating alternative. I'm too mainstream for alternative. I'm too alternative for mainstream. And I'm just kind of wandering.

K.d. Lang

#30. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!

Pete La Roca

#31. Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here.

Michelle Shocked

#32. I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

Colin Meloy

#33. The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

Kevin Ayers

#34. I think Edward Sharpe's music is counter-cultural music in the strangest sense where you have a time now where love, optimism, hope and community are uncool and not part of the mainstream culture.

Alex Ebert

#35. MTV definitely has the effect of narrowing the range of music that hits the mainstream. On the other hand, isn't that the effect of television in general?

Ann Powers

#36. Alternative music is no longer alternative once it's in the mainstream.

Kurt Cobain

#37. All of my favorite records have vocals high in the mix, even if it's music that wasn't necessarily mainstream.

Dee Dee Ramone

#38. Celtic music will always be around, even if with the mainstream crowds it dies out.

Natalie MacMaster

#39. In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn't complacent, it's stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That's not wimpy - it's powerful and productive.

Michael Azerrad

#40. In the '90s, the radio was still alive with all different kinds of points of view, and I think that's why people are longing for that time. It was the first time that alternative music broke through to the mainstream.

Shirley Manson

#41. The only two shows I watch are 'Walking Dead' and 'Nashville,' but both just went off the air for a couple of months, so I feel like I have to be productive because I'm not sitting around waiting for the next episode of zombies or mainstream country music.

Caitlin Rose

#42. I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

Thom Yorke

#43. There was a long time in my life where I made music that I thought my friends would like, or that I thought would get me a record deal, or what I thought I was supposed to make because that's what I was seeing in mainstream. I didn't know myself; I didn't find myself musically or, in real life.

Danny Brown

#44. When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music.

Dan Hill

#45. Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old.

Robert Glasper