Top 100 Quotes About Popular Music
#1. 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.
Tommy Shaw
#2. I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.
Jason Isbell
#3. We are living in a time when American popular music is finally being recognized as one of our most successful exports. The demand is huge.
Billy Joel
#4. The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.
Pete Seeger
#5. Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.
Irving Berlin
#6. 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.
Skitch Henderson
#7. Irving Berlin said, "Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it." That doesn't mean it's good or bad - that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hotdogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?
Lester Bangs
#8. I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.
Lester Bangs
#9. It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies ... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this.
Warren Zevon
#10. I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.
Bing Crosby
#11. I play popular songs. This is not some obscure, unusual music. This is popular music.
Frank Fairfield
#12. What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?
Lara St. John
#13. The idea that rhythm is intrinsically human - not just primitive - that we all have hearts that beat at a steady rate and don't stop ... reminds me of life itself. In that sense my music is like certain popular music where the rhythm drives from beginning to end.
Michael Torke
#14. Popular music is a microcosm of the culture, Eliza. It reflects the mentality of the population.
Tiffanie DeBartolo
#15. 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.
Brian Eno
#16. The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part.
David Byrne
#17. 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.
Bill Dixon
#18. Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.
Kenneth Edmonds
#19. 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.
Tom Waits
#20. I love the history of popular music. I love to know what people are listening to, even if I don't like it.
Tim Rice
#21. 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.
Jon Landau
#22. Mumford and Sons and Adele are both incredible artists and are great for popular music. There's a lot of club music with heavy beats, so to have that Mumford record and hear banjos being used is so cool.
Dave Haywood
#23. 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.
Tim Cahill
#24. I feel the popular music of a certain time really tells you a lot about what life was like in that period.
Paz De La Huerta
#26. To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.
John Philip Sousa
#27. Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
Terry Teachout
#28. 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.
Tom Wopat
#29. Bob Geldof is a nauseating character. Band Aid was the most self-righteous platform ever in the history of popular music.
Steven Morrissey
#30. In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.
James Fenton
#31. I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues.
David Johansen
#32. [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.
Leonard Cohen
#33. I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.
Quincy Jones
#34. Jazz really does try to include everything. It's always been popular music. But the wonderful thing about jazz is its willingness to take chances.
Madeleine Peyroux
#35. [T]he best, truest popular music is one born of journeys and arrivals, of long odysseys and lightning epiphanies.
Gerri Hirshey
#36. My mum was very good at making me take up musical instruments, so although there was no popular music she made me learn the recorder when I was three, the violin when I was five and the piano when I was seven. I took up the guitar myself when I was 14.
James Blunt
#37. Explicit material is available in a variety of forums - from popular music to television to the Internet.
Tipper Gore
#38. Popularity gets up people's noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.
Andrea Bocelli
#39. Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.
Renee Fleming
#40. 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.
Moby
#41. 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.
Simon De Pury
#42. Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?
Billy Joel
#43. 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.
Jonny Greenwood
#44. I'm trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It's popular music: it's everything for everybody.
Theophilus London
#45. It was such an amazing time for music in the Sixties. When popular music hit me, it was like magic was in the air.
Ozzy Osbourne
#46. 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.
Scott Weiland
#47. 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.
Steven Soderbergh
#49. Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist.
Moby
#50. Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.
Greil Marcus
#51. Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me.
Elton John
#52. Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it's Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It's just the beat that changes.
L.A. Reid
#53. 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.
Woody Allen
#54. In each medium - popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively - the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.
Stacey D'Erasmo
#55. One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.
Billy Collins
#56. I like musicianship, and it's quite lacking in most modern popular music. You're always safe with old Chicago, the Allman Brothers, Gov't Mule, or Tower of Power.
Mark Rippetoe
#57. The problem of expressing the contributions that Benny Carter has made to popular music is so tremendous it completely fazes me, so extraordinary a musician is he.
Duke Ellington
#58. It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters, that whoever can speak can sing. So, probably, every man is eloquent once in his life. Our temperaments differ in capacity of heat, or
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#60. Steve Marcus was one of the greatest saxophonists in all of music. He truly was able to unite jazz with the popular music of the time.
Larry Coryell
#61. The love of Christ is not a pretend love. It is not a greeting-card love. It is not the kind of love that is praised in popular music and movies.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
#62. I would consider my music like, pop-R&B. So it can reach a lot of people. Pop is popular music. That's what it stands for. So I'm just making music that I know that I like, I know other people will like, and my fans will like.
Justin Bieber
#63. In my opinion, it seems like music is taking a bit of a turn. Look at Mumford and Sons, and the Lumineers. It seems like people and music fans are enjoying the more artistic side of music, and that popular music is taking a turn and accepting that, so I appreciate that.
Phillip Phillips
#64. 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.
Tony Bennett
#65. Popular music usually has a chorus that needs to repeat, and people need to remember the song. That's sort of the major guideline when you're writing a song.
Alex Ebert
#66. The history of popular music is littered with great partnerships. Rodgers had his Hammerstein, Lennon had his McCartney, and Lloyd Webber had ... his photocopier ...
Humphrey Lyttelton
#67. Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music.
Jay-Z
#68. 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. So there's some connection between visual images and music.
Robert Crumb
#69. Teen pop will never die as long as there are teens and popular music. It just takes a different head.
Justin Timberlake
#70. As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Terry Teachout
#71. It doesn't take long to sum up the major theses of most popular music: he loves me; he left me; I need him; I needed him, but now I need his best friend. Rather limited scope.
Holly Near
#72. The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.
Bonnie Raitt
#73. My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people.
Paul Weller
#74. The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.
Tracy Chapman
#75. 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.
Dinah Shore
#76. Our popular music talks constantly about love, and yet divorce rates skyrocket.
Billy Graham
#77. It is inescapable that Ringo was the catalyst for the others. He certainly completed the jigsaw and The Beatles, with Ringo, became a magnet for the great camera artists of the world, a target for the jaded, lately hostile eyes of people who had hardly known that popular music existed.
Brian Epstein
#78. My father was not really into popular music; I had to learn about that for myself.
Todd Rundgren
#79. 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.
Judith Jamison
#80. I am not concerned about the 80 BMP consistency law of popular music. I'm concerned with other things, and they're very valid.
Doseone
#82. If you don't know the blues ... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.
Keith Richards
#83. 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
#84. All of the most popular music of the '30s and '40s were deeply informed by jazz.
Terry Teachout
#85. When I was growing up, music was music and there were no genres. We didn't look at it as country music. Popular music in Tuskegee was country music. So I didn't know it in categories. It was the radio.
Lionel Richie
#86. I grew up on popular music, and rock-and-roll expresses very deep feelings of those people who don't have a lot.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#87. 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.
Robert Plant
#88. The popular music wasn't interesting-bad, it was bad-bad. Auto-Tuned vocalists who couldn't really sing; offensively simplistic instrumentation; grating melodies. Like they thought we were stupid.
Leila Sales
#89. Popular music is slowly being laid to rest in every conceivable way ... the ashes are already about us if we could but notice them.
Steven Morrissey
#90. There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land.
Miranda Lambert
#91. Folk-punk artists like This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb or Paul Baribeau were popular in the Florida punk community. I saw people early on combine roots music with more aggressive music.
Benjamin Booker
#92. It really is, to see that this kind of music is still so popular.
Wanda Jackson
#93. Give the People what they want - and they'll get what they deserve.
The Kinks
#94. Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music.
Stephen Chbosky
#95. Ibiza is a popular vacation place for a lot of the players in Spain. If you go in the summer, there are some of the world's most famous movie and music stars, so nobody cares about soccer players.
Xavi
#96. Now, in music, it seems more like the popular crowd suppresses anyone who is different.
Liz Phair
#97. Given that there was that era of girl group music and it's still very popular, but I think if you looked at the chart from that time you would see many more men on it. Because the industry, they were catering to young girls. I mean, that's what they thought their audience was.
Lesley Gore
#98. I don't know if I was as ambitious as to change the world, but I do feel like - the reason why I called the album "Our Version of Events" was that I feel a lot of people are not represented in pop music and popular culture.
Emeli Sande
#99. I'm sure if we had made an album that was more traditional would have been released immediately. When we actually play this music on stage and people become familiar with it, it will become more popular.
Mick Taylor
#100. If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like.
Bill Bryson
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