Top 50 Popular Music Quotes

Adele ultimately did well in such a large way because she affects everybody, and the way that she writes seems to be popular music, not because of her skin color but because she writes great music, and it’s popular in that way.

In the West, film music is completely different and independent from their popular music. The two industries are separate and don’t interfere much.

It’s a great thing that the United States has given the rest of the world – no other country has given such great popular music to the Far East and Europe. When I play those great countries, a lot of times, the audience starts singing the songs with me. They know them. They love them.

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.

I was a piano performance major at USC. I left before I graduated because I realized at some point I wasn’t going to be a concert pianist and I was too attracted to popular music.

My particular space has always been quite unique in popular music. I have a background in R&B and hard rock and straight pop, but I never went all the way with any of those genres.

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?

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

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.

I want people to feel what it was like in the ’40s. That’s when popular music in the United States was so beautiful. Frank Sinatra, the Pied Pipers, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Tommy Dorsey, Billie Holiday. That’s when popular music had deeper values, to me. This was music that was selling millions of records.

I have always loved composers who have been connected with folk traditions of popular music.

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

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.

Amplification of guitars revolutionized the popular music scene. Youngsters look for quick fame and big money with amplified guitars and working with rock groups.

The first half of ‘Book Reports’ deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular 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. So there’s some connection between visual images and music.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world’s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

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.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

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.

I grew up on popular music, and rock-and-roll expresses very deep feelings of those people who don’t have a lot.

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.

I’m trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It’s popular music: it’s everything for everybody.

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.

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.

The trick of Afrobeats is it doesn’t just move your upper body, it moves your hips as well, and I think that’s what people have been missing in popular music for a while. I think that’s what people need around the world.

I want to produce the best popular music I can.

All of the most popular music of the ’30s and ’40s were deeply informed by jazz.

Obviously spending my teenage years in music, and in popular music, I wanted to continue this career, but in a way that allows me to dictate it and create it myself as opposed to relying on third party or more corporate decision making.

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.

I express myself using my classical skills to write more complex forms of popular music.

I have a varied collection of music on my phone. I like a lot of the popular music that has a really energetic beat to it, as well as some classical things.

Popular music has always had its really horrendous stuff.

The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.

There’s a tremendous audience out there for popular music. It’s a bigger audience than for movies.

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.

I grew up listening to popular music. My father was a Peruvian folk singer. He played the guitar at home. He sang songs with a waltzing rhythm, yet you can still hear the Spanish influences. I accompanied him to his performances.

Folk music has been our popular music… There is a myth that youngsters only like heavy metal or rock music, but that’s not true.

I turned popular music on the radio, and I never listened to it again after that, in about 1985. That’s when I switched over to classical music, and I pretty much stayed with that since then.

I believe it’s possible to have hit songs and popular music that’s recorded by human beings.

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.

I don’t see that there are any particular changes in popular music.

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.

Popular music sucks so bad right now.

I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno’s fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.

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.

There’s almost no popular music I listen to now. I’ll hear it because it’s everywhere… Music is ubiquitous now.

I don’t think I’m turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It’s just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That’s why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I’m not doing imitations. That’s the way they sound inside me.

I’ll be, like, grocery shopping or doing something totally mundane, and once a day, you’ll hear a Cyndi Lauper song on the radio. It is astounding what an icon she is, not just in popular music but in popular culture.

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.