Quotes About Underground Music

#1. I went to underground music studios. In the studios, I learned that you can make a movie without a permit.

Bahman Ghobadi

#2. I feel like Harriet Tubman, except I am trying to free people through underground music, to free themselves creatively and inspirationally.

Janelle Monae

#3. I know Diplo knows a lot about underground music culture - he was one of the people to put me onto music like that when I used to listen to the Mad Decent Mixes. It was like, 'Oh, he knows what I want.'

Kreayshawn

#4. The first thing I learned was the 'St Louis Blues' when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.

Jools Holland

#5. There is nothing I like more than pure underground music

Kurt Cobain

#6. In underground music, there seems to be this real inability for people to express themselves in any kind of heroic or mythological way. There's this idea that we're all normal joes, and that creating a persona onstage or having schtick is somehow false and misleading and evil.

Ian Svenonius

#7. My parents didn't really restrict my movement, so I got involved in the underground music scene and the activism scene; I was doing some volunteering in food relief. I spent a lot of time throughout the city in poor areas, even though my family lived in a wealthy area.

Jess Row

#8. 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

#9. Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes.

Kathleen Hanna

#10. If you want to talk about EDM, let's talk about Detroit underground music, Chicago house and let's talk about all the things that got us to this place. We all get on the train of dance music. We need to all respectfully look through the carriages that have come before us and realize how we got here.

Goldie

#11. I got caught up on drugs for a few years, I'm off it, I'm very happy, got two kids and a family and everything. And like I said I'm making the underground music, and keeping it real.

Vanilla Ice

#12. As far as my New York influence, one thing I'm proud of in my career is, I rep Brooklyn, New York all day. But people don't look at my music as New York music. People consider my music underground music.

Talib Kweli

#13. There are artists that are using computers in all genres - Kendrick Lamar's music is electronic-made, and Taylor Swift is the same thing. There's a lot of pop music, underground music, and music for films made with computers. In that sense, it's not going to go away.

Skrillex

#14. I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.

Bahman Ghobadi

#15. I didn't really get into underground comics, though I've liked some of what I've seen. Dame Darcy was very impressive to meet, really talented. In general, I've always been more interested in searching out music, so I think I miss out on a lot of underground art.

Neil Farber

#16. I think Andy Kaufman is to comedy what the Velvet Underground was to music - it's like, 80 thousand records sold, but everybody who bought one started a band.

Courtney Love

#17. A lot of punk rock. I listen to various stuff just cuz my friends now listen to a lot of different bands. I listen to a lot of underground stuff like jungle music.

Cassie Steele

#18. I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

Dean Wareham

#19. I listen to a lot of different music. I love hip-hop. I'm a big underground rap fan. I listen to the likes of J. Cole. Lately, I've also been getting into techno house music. And I've been on an Eighties retro kick, and I've even been experimenting with some rock.

Denzel Whitaker

#20. I want to sell tracks but at the same time I want to stay true to the music I like. This is why I love the underground scene because they can stay true to what they want to do.

Rahki

#21. I listen to all kinds of music. I love underground, new music that's popping.

Juicy J

#22. Underground electronic music is art - fundamentally it's based on contemporary art, culture, dance, and real music. If you look at EDM, how many of those cultural standpoints are the same?

Seth Troxler

#23. This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.

Lauren Oliver

#24. When the music industry started collapsing, the logical people understood that the only place to go for shelter was the underground. If the world on the surface is burning up, and you know people that have bunkers, go to the bunkers.

Will.i.am

#25. I think what's happenin' is that, with the overflow of music, it's been diluted. There was a time when people would go search out underground records. Now, underground means free, and people don't really care for it. So now artists tend to go more pop and look for the radio.

Ice-T

#26. Taking people on a journey is the fundamental element of underground dance music. I don't sell records.

Seth Troxler

#27. If she could see the beauty of this underground world, and appreciate what it means: the music, the dancing, the feeling of fingertips and lips, like a moment of flight after a lifetime of crawling.

Lauren Oliver

#28. As I got older I became a kind of sub cultural junkie, foraging around in music, street fashion and eventually art, politics and the freakier reaches of the Internet, hunting the next discovery, the next seam of underground gold.

Hari Kunzru

#29. Good music often starts in underground culture and then comes to the surface.

Felix Buxton

#30. As if music could be crushed like a condemned building or a stubborn anarchist. But it could not. It always rose and returned, vital, immense, fortified by new instruments, new shapes, new musicians crazy enough to give their lives to it like underground, unsanctioned priests.

Carolina De Robertis

#31. The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive.

Michael Azerrad

#32. At the end of the '90s and into 2000, electronic music was still an underground phenomenon, especially in America.

Tiesto

#33. But if you tame me, my life will be filled with sunshine. I'll know the sound of footsteps that will be different from all the rest. Others send me back underground. Yours will call me out of my burrow like music.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#34. I like to go on YouTube to see the underground sounds, what the kids are listening to, and kind of gauge my music around that.

Missy Elliot

#35. 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

#36. I grew up in the '90s. I listened to a lot of The Clash, Velvet Underground and Roxy Music. I wasn't into Boyzone, or anything.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

#37. When I would play pop music at underground shows, it was offensive to some people. I wasn't doing it to piss people off: I just didn't believe in those strong divisions that you're supposed to listen to this or that.

Girl Talk

#38. As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

Moby

#39. When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.

Frank Iero

#40. I was going to be a musician, no matter what it took. I supported myself with blue-collared jobs so I could write music and be in a band and play shows. I even got into an underground art scene. I was going to do whatever.

Chris Cornell

#41. When I was very little, I was into Michael Jackson. At six or seven, it was Madonna, but she's not what she used to be. I've been into everything from Edith Piaf to Joe Strummer to the Velvet Underground to Suicide to A Tribe Called Quest to African music.

Lykke Li

#42. In World War II, jazz absolutely was the music of freedom, and then in the Cold War, behind the Iron Curtain, same thing. It was all underground, but they needed the food of freedom that jazz offered.

Herbie Hancock

#43. The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light - grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

Eleanor Catton

#44. Of course, I'm a dancer. Dancing grabbed me from the start and I have was never afraid to do it. With out dance I wouldn't be singing. I want to expose people to the underground dance scene through music.

Jillian Hervey

#45. Underground dance music - in the nicest way possible - it's amateur

Axwell