Quotes About Rock Music

#1. People called rock & roll 'African music.' They called it 'voodoo music.' They said that it would drive the kids insane. They said that it was just a flash in the pan - the same thing that they always used to say about hip-hop.

Little Richard

#2. I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.

Sean Lennon

#3. We all have very different musical DNA, and we all follow different musical paths. Yet there is a unifying quality about rock'n'roll that helps instill confidence and hope in millions of fans at times in their lives when little else makes sense.

Robert Hilburn

#4. I grew up listening to everything. And rock and roll has always been a big, big part of it - as big a part of what I do as any other type of music.

Jason Aldean

#5. I did not want to be somebody who lived off his reputation. I wanted to continue to be part of the modern music scene.

Mick Rock

#6. I'm John Lee Hooker in the sense that he was a blues man and he played blues his whole life. I'm a rock guy and I'm going to play rock music my whole life.

Sammy Hagar

#7. I'm glad people think I'm a badass. I'm a rock and roller, and I'm an R&B and a blueswoman. I don't do fairy music, although I love Celtic music and sensitive music. There's a balance between ballads and kick-ass songs.

Bonnie Raitt

#8. The secret to longevity in the music business is to change, and to be able to change. An actor has to assume other people's identities. A rock star doesn't need to do that. But change is important.

Nick Cave

#9. You don't just have to be influenced by rock, or goth, anymore. It's okay to say, 'My influences are Tin Pan music from Bali and Rihanna.' There are still so many combinations that haven't been done yet.

Grimes

#10. We're a gumbo of American music, and aren't ashamed to play pop or soul or rock because we all grew up on radio.

Jonathan Cain

#11. When people say you're doing something radical in rock or dance music, I'm not sure how special that is. What we do is so old-fashioned. It's like trying to do something innovative in tap-dancing.

Jonny Greenwood

#12. In Nashville, there is a historic tendency to work the lyric to death while settling for music that works. In pop or rock, it can be the other way around.

Michael Kosser

#13. The justification for rap rock seems to be that if you take really bad rock and put really bad rap over it, the result is somehow good, provided the raps are barked by an overweight white guy with cropped hair and forearm tattoos.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

#14. Rock music is electronic music, dependent entirely on electronic circuitry and amplification.

John Frusciante

#15. You should have felt the buzz the moment all five of us got together in the same room for the first time again. We all started laughin' - it was like the five years had never passed. We knew we'd made the right move.

Steven Tyler

#16. I've always liked pop music. There was a bit of a misunderstanding with the avant-garde rock scene, because I think I was sort of swimming the wrong way, really.

Robert Wyatt

#17. "Go and Say Goodbye" by the Buffalo Springfield stands as one of the first examples of what would later be branded country rock

Chris Hillman

#18. Hip hop is the new rock n' roll, you know what I mean? And anybody who doesn't think that is just sort of living in the past. It's all just American music, really, when you get right down to it.

Dan Auerbach

#19. Every musician, their goal in life is to play music that people love, and I've accomplished my goal. I was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and left that chapter of my life and those people in the past. Good and bad, I've loved and am thankful for that chapter.

Steven Adler

#20. Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.

Andy Biersack

#21. I've always wanted not to give a fuck. While crying helplessly into my pillow for no good reason, I would often fantasize that maybe someday I could be one of those stoic badasses whose emotions are mostly comprised of rock music and not being afraid of things.

Allie Brosh

#22. It's true that laptop performances can be boring for the audience. The problem is, the organizers of events are still putting us on the classic "rock stage," instead of trying to find new ways to present the music.

Christian Fennesz

#23. Rock & roll is a type of sensuous music unfit for impressionable minds.

Tip O'Neill

#24. America is tough for rock music. Rock n' roll used to be the main music for the youth, and it's not so much anymore. It's hip-hop and stuff.

Taylor Hawkins

#25. There's a new hit rock group or singer every five minutes, but with country music, you have one hit and those people love you forever.

Kenny Rogers

#26. I think a lot of people came into rock n' roll to try to change the world. I came into rock n' roll to make music.

Steve Winwood

#27. People are used to seeing kids jump around. You know, the target audience, the audience that's spending money on music, like rock and hip-hop - they're used to seeing people get really physically involved in their music.

Eric Lewis

#28. We may be finished with the past but the past is not finished with us.

Donald Riggio

#29. My dad supports me. He said, "I wished when I was at your age I started doing rock and roll music. Then I wouldn't have to be a fashion designer." And I just laugh and keep it moving and appreciate his support.

Richard Hilfiger

#30. The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.

Carrie Brownstein

#31. You don't see a lot of black rock stars. The music industry tends to be segregated stylistically. It's hard for a black artist to cross over to rock music.

Lance Reddick

#32. That's what rock music is, I think - constantly searching for authenticity, and being as honest as possible.

Jonathan Jackson

#33. Give the People what they want - and they'll get what they deserve.

The Kinks

#34. I always wanted to get into rock music so I could cover up my real personality, change my voice, and create a false self to hide behind.

Ariel Pink

#35. I think that I have a pretty varied taste in music I think. And it is primarily rock music big umbrella that I am, I am not into hip-hop. But, I do like both.

Kristen Stewart

#36. There's too much rock that relies a fetishism or nostalgia for the old ways. That's a real enemy to music.

Matt Tong

#37. Politicians and music don't mix. It's like whiskey and wine.

Kid Rock

#38. I was drawn to love songs, but I was just drawn to great music - no matter if it's hip-hop, pop, R&B or whether it's rock n' roll or country. It could be a Garth Brooks song, and if it's a smash, then I'll love the different wordplay and different melodies. That's what I'm a fan of - great music.

Nayvadius Cash

#39. We create music to express ourselves and when the world relates, that's a beautiful thing. We're all trading off each other's culture, so no matter what lines you put-country indie rock, rap, we're all somehow gonna find a way to come together.

Jay-Z

#40. I have been thinking about what might happen if they installed clappers to turn on and off the lights in a concert hall. Maybe they could spare the cost of hiring some people for the next rock concert.

Linnea Gelland

#41. Charles and I are from Augusta, Ga. - so we come from James Brown territory, soul music and Motown. And Charles has always had a lot of Southern rock in there as well.

Dave Haywood

#42. I am a producer of both rock and New Age music, I generally like all categories of music. In particular, I enjoy Ozzy's stage presence.

Frederick Lenz

#43. We thought everybody read comics. We didn't know we were weird. We didn't know people that collected comics were strange. It was as normal as listening to rock music on the radio.

Gilbert Hernandez

#44. I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

Rivers Cuomo

#45. It's really vital to have rock music because it connects the generations. It's important in that way.

Christine Ebersole

#46. Rock was different from rock and roll. Rock was virtuosic and adult, as opposed to popsy and teenaged. Rock and roll was apolitical and fun, while rock was "heavy" and often political, creating vistas of psychic energy that carried beyond the music itself and into radical politics and art.

Stephen Davis

#47. Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.

Chuck Klosterman

#48. Now, what of the entertainment that is available to our young people today? Are you being undermined right in your homes through your television, radio, slick magazines, and rock music records?

Ezra Taft Benson

#49. I had tried marijuana several times, but in the words of my friend and longtime assistant Janet Stark, When I smoke pot, it makes me want to hide under the bed with a box of graham crackers and not share.

Linda Ronstadt

#50. I like putting common expressions next to uncommon expressions. I'm sure in Poetry 101 there is a name for it, but it seems like you usually go one way or the other in rock music.

Dan Bejar

#51. It might sound chauvinistic, but there is a sad reality in rock music: Bands who depend on support from females inevitably crash and burn.

Chuck Klosterman

#52. I'm very moved by Renaissance music, but I still love to play hard rock - though only if it's sophisticated and has some thought behind it.

Ritchie Blackmore

#53. Todd and Tim [Tobias] write the music, and I come up with the melodies and lyrics. I call it the Ohio Rock Factory. Tim and Todd run the northern plant in Cleveland, and I've got the southern plant down here in Dayton. No tours permitted.

Robert Pollard

#54. I got turned on to rock music almost by mistake when I was seven years old.

Jello Biafra

#55. I like rock music. I like jazz better, though.

Clarke Peters

#56. I have truly eclectic taste in music, and I seem to cycle through phases in terms of to what's inspiring me. I'll go from Beethoven to Sigur Ros; world music, Brit-pop, classic rock, blues/jazz, even the odd bit of heavy metal.

Rachel Miner

#57. My inner rock chick has always been there. I grew up listening to a lot of rock music through my sisters, who were teenagers while I was young, so they had control of the radio.

Carrie Underwood

#58. Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.

Cameron Crowe

#59. In rock music, people have certain assumptions that it makes people more enlightened, and it really doesn't.

Kim Gordon

#60. Even more than music, rock-and-roll is sex.

A.D. Aliwat

#61. I have my books
And my poetry to protect me;
I am shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb.
I touch no one and no one touches me.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

Paul Simon

#62. I was musically baptized by the black founding fathers of rock-and-roll, and like all real music lovers, the music changed, enriched, upgraded and fortified our lives forever.

Ted Nugent

#63. I have so many songs, it's ridiculous. I love so many different types of music and tend to write all over the map, style-wise. R&B, rock 'n' roll, screamers, pop, good-time songs.

Taryn Manning

#64. I've been doing the academic side of music and the rock side of music in conjunction, basically, since I was in fourth grade.

Glenn Kotche

#65. You're talking to someone who really understands rock music.

Tipper Gore

#66. I'm sure that if Plato hadn't been against music with a strong sexual beat, Bloom would have kept quiet about rock-and-roll.

E.D. Hirsch Jr.

#67. The rock & roll industry is very incestuous, and we have all been close at one time or another. A lot of beautiful music and a lot of beautiful times came from that. A lot of pain, too, because, inevitably, different relationships broke up.

Joni Mitchell

#68. I guess it was only fitting that to them PUNK was a four letter word. However, to people like Dylan and I-punk was our hearts-our souls. We grew up with a lot of uncertainties. To be a teenager isn't always pretty, and our music reflected that.

Brian Joyce

#69. Obviously the people that I admired, like the Beatles, were really into rock'n'roll, but it was already a little past rock'n'roll when I started listening and making my own choices about music.

Elvis Costello

#70. There is no dark side of the moon really. As a matter of fact it's all dark.

Pink Floyd

#71. I don't really feel like a rock artist, but I guess in the small category of the world of music genres, that's where I fall in because I've got a guitar.

Courtney Barnett

#72. Music always sounds better on Friday.

Lou Brutus

#73. Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

Pete Townshend

#74. I decided that in order to become a big famous rock star, I would need to write my very own songs instead of wasting my time learning other peoples music too much. It may act as an obstruction in developing your very own personal style.

Kurt Cobain

#75. The music that I have always liked has always been more rooted in anger or sadness or alienation or any of those inspirational factors that drove rock'n'roll, gospel, and blues. I tend not to value a more pop aesthetic.

DJ Shadow

#76. I have to admit, I do not listen to much rock music.

Giorgio Moroder

#77. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.

Rokia Traore

#78. We played more rock music when we were writing the script. 'Renegade'. All of the Styx songs. All of the old '70's and '80's music, that's the stuff that's pounding in the background while we were doing this stuff. It's a part of those movies.

Todd Farmer

#79. I was listening to music long before rock 'n roll.

Bill Wyman

#80. Couples swayed and embraced to the beat as the singer's vocals soared above a group of confused teenagers and twenty-something's.

Brian Joyce

#81. I think the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, first of all, has got to be put into the context of being an American cultural showcase. It's there to be a museum showcase of all that's great about American music.

Ian Anderson

#82. Some guy said to me: Don't you think you're too old to sing rock n' roll?
I said: You'd better check with Mick Jagger.

Cher

#83. I tried to reach the combatants with my music. I tried to turn my anger into something positive. Myself, and others like me, just tried to keep rock and roll alive.

Eric Burdon

#84. Rock music is important to people , because it allows them to escape this crazy world. It allows them not to run away from the problems that are there, but to face up to them , but at the same time sort of DANCE ALL OVER THEM. That's what rock and roll is about.

Pete Townshend

#85. My favorite type of music to sing and to listen to, you know, rock. It's not always metal, but you know, half the time it is. Metal's cool, you know? Not everybody on 'American Idol' listens to metal.

James Durbin

#86. Hardcore without punk isn't music, it's a genre of porn. And punk isn't a genre of music, it's a thought process.

Dominic Owen Mallary

#87. The marketing department is really an important part of getting an animated film to work. If the people running it are used to selling live action films and the hard rock music and the sex and all those things ... Anything outside that, they just don't know what to do with it.

Don Bluth

#88. For the longest time I was brought up listening to only two genres of music, pop and rock. So in the past few years I've been trying to expand my interests because I think that you can only write to the extent of your knowledge, and if your knowledge is limited you can't write past that.

Jacqueline Emerson

#89. Music is the soundtrack to the crappy movie that is my life.

Chris Rock

#90. Everybody started calling my music rock and roll, but it wasn't anything but the same rhythm and blues I'd been playing down in New Orleans.

Fats Domino

#91. That's the beautiful thing about the saxophone. It can peacefully coexist with just about anything - whether it's hip-hop, rap, rock music, pop, R&B or jazz, there's a place for the saxophone in all of those styles.

Dave Koz

#92. Punk is not just the sound, the music, punk is a lifestyle.

Green Day

#93. Frank [Zappa]'s music was never for the mass audience. His music contains specific kinds of information that you won't find elsewhere in rock and roll.

Gail Zappa

#94. I listen to crazy, robust rock music where they sing their faces off, and soul music, which can be similar.

Adam Lambert

#95. We're the McDonalds of rock. Were always there to satisfy, and a billion served.

Paul Stanley

#96. We believed anything worth doing was worth over-doing

Steven Tyler

#97. Rock has always been THE DEVIL'S MUSIC ... I believe rock and roll is dangerous ... I feel we're only heralding SOMETHING EVEN DARKER THAN OURSELVES.

David Bowie

#98. I don't listen to a ton of rock music.

Brendon Urie

#99. A culture which doesn't believe in region and religion is like a rock music, noise for old generation & nirvana for the young ones.

Megha Khare

#100. What were we, but kids with apartments and jobs anyway?

Brian Joyce