Top 636 Pop Quotes

What’s missing from pop music is danger.

My goal in life has been to be a songsmith, not a pop person.

I don’t listen to the contemporary pop artists. They all sound alike, anyway.

The hardest thing about being in this business is just being able to be yourself. People act like there’s this one set of rules to follow to be a pop star and I think, ‘Well, you say I’m a pop star, so maybe that’s not true.’

The great music for so many artists – the Beatles, the Rolling Stones – was always at the moment when they were closest to pop. It would be easy for U2 to go off and have a concept album, but I want us to stay in the pop fray.

Daft Punk wouldn’t have normally fit into anything that was pop on the radio, but they just did it.

I have no ambitions to be a pop star.

Like it or not, I am part of the pop culture of films in Hollywood.

It will shock many – I’ve lived a full life and really enjoyed my time as a pop star.

Folk music is music that everyday people can play, and it inspired a lot of people to make their own music. That trailed into making your own pop music, and that’s why garage bands started springing up everywhere.

I think women in pop have been declawed and defanged, and they’re just meant to look pretty and sing pretty.

If you don’t want to put on any makeup, try some fake eyelashes. They make your eyes pop and give you a little confidence boost.

I wanted to get rid of the element that had been considered essential in pop music: the voice.

I’m kind of a pop culture stew, you know.

When you see a crowd of people jumping up and down at a pop concert, all gloriously in the moment, I don’t think you’ll ever see a comedian there. They’ll all be standing at the sides, looking at how it all fits together.

I don’t think people look at how pop stars live and feel anything aspirational at all.

Disco is just pop music you can dance to.

I grew up listening to pop; I grew up listening to ’60s pop music, the Beatles, the Monkees, Herman’s Hermits and all that stuff. So I had a very strong background of listening to great pop music.

The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early ’90s. I don’t think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive.

Fact: The new ‘90210’ is cooler than the old ‘90210.’ It’s the lithe, streamlined Skipper to the elder series’ venerable Barbie. Gone are the traditional parents – they’ve been replaced by a hipster mom n’ pop who get busted necking in the car.

The music that I’ve had out so far was obviously very pop, but when I signed with Hollywood Records, I was like, ‘I know that’s the music you’re familiar with, but that’s not what I want to sing. I want to do country.’ They were on board with it!

Within three months I had gone from being this black sheep of the town to suddenly becoming a pop star.

There are pop managers, and then there’s Simon Cowell, who isn’t gay, Jewish or particularly riveting. He’s not without interest but he doesn’t exactly have the hinterland of, say, Brian Epstein.

There’s a constantly applicable nature to soul music, whereas sometimes pop music can be a periodical.

I’ve explored the worship side, the pop side, and the film scoring side of me.

Pop stars are so busy having a career that they don’t really have a lot of time for activism.

I love all types of music. I love top 40 dance pop, hip-hop, I don’t even know what they call it now. I’m a huge fan of all that.

Lauryn Hill’s always been a hero of mine. And Bruno Mars, Janelle Monae and Adele, those are the current artists I would reference in terms of who’s been able to do really amazing pop records with really cool, organic throwback elements of soul in there as well.

I guess you could call my music progressive, pop, rock.

It’s weird, man. I’ve had a weird life, and I don’t want to end up on the dole. I’m fed up with the plumbing. And I think it would be good to be a little pop star again.

‘Dus’ was different from ‘Tum Bin,’ and ‘Ra.One’ from ‘Dus,’ but the difference didn’t pop out as much as ‘Mulk.’ That was because it was an issue-based film and crossed the line as being a serious, hard-hitting movie.

On ‘America’s Top Model,’ I’ve always told my girls to smile with their eyes. We call it ‘smizing.’ Over the years, it’s actually become part of pop culture. I would be walking down the street, and girls would say, ‘Smize!’

My parents wanted to light my artistic candle. But over time, the definition of ‘the arts’ began to stretch. And as I got older, they suddenly realized, Oh, my God, we’re the parents of Iggy Pop.

More students have a better knowledge of pop culture than of the Constitution.

I tend to score with songs from Western pop music.

My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.

Pop music has progressed.

Pop knew absolutely nothing about pro football.

There are a lot of artists that come and go very quickly, and I understand why just because someone has a No. 1 doesn’t necessarily mean they should be up for best male or female categories. I understand that Aria are protecting the integrity of what Aria is, but I do think that pop music isn’t recognised enough.

I’m not doing this to be a pop star. I’ve had plenty of money and attention. I’m doing it for credibility.

When we try to write a pop song, we go for standard pop arrangements, even to the point where we will go to the key change at the end, which is really cheesy.

You have to stay updated on trends, social things and pop culture, you need to stay with the times and keep evolving.

I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.

All the folks I play with come from jazz backgrounds or at least appreciate spontaneity within the parameters of a pop song.

I have a good memory for early life. My visual memory is good about childhood and adolescence, and less good in the last 10 years. I could probably tell you less what happened in the last 10 years. I remember what houses looked like, sometimes they just pop into my head.

American pop culture is perpetually in adolescent mode. The notions of what it takes to be a man, as depicted in pop culture, are very superficial, one-dimensional, and adolescent.

I always wanted to create a site that was sports and pop culture. ’30 for 30′ had a big impact because I loved how that was about finding, empowering and working with these incredible directors, and I thought the same thing could work for writers.

I enjoy all forms of music – pop, classical and opera.

I really do listen to all types of music, not only rock, but everything from good pop music – which is usually older pop music – to R&B and indie rock. I love indie rock more than a lot of the commercial stuff that you’d expect.

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the ’90s, so music was very different then – it was really lyrical.

Jerry Robinson illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture’s greatest icons. As an artist myself, it’s impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work. Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich legacy that he leaves behind.

I was a weird-looking chubby, half-Asian kid who didn’t have the pop star look.

Pop is actually my least favorite kind of music, because it lacks real depth.

I think pop music is a great place to get new ideas across.

The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That’s the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

I’m this strange kind of fusion of jazz, pop, and R&B.

On first listening, Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court And Spark,’ the first truly great pop album of 1974, sounds surprisingly light; by the third or fourth listening, it reveals its underlying tensions.

I think that I was lucky that I was 30 when I did ‘Love Story’, which came with this extravagant pop celebrity. I had already done 15 years of what I call ‘real’ work.’ I was a waitress, chambermaid, and a photographer’s assistant, so I knew that I was tremendously lucky as a novice actor to have that big hit.

I, of course, wanted to play real jazz. When we played pop tunes, and naturally we had to, I wanted those pops to kick! Not loud and fast, understand, but smoothly and with a definite punch.

Pop music catches on like a meme. It just takes a little bit of tinder, and it can become a phenomenon. You have to break through that wall a little bit. Why it happens, I don’t really know.

There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger.

Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they’re on the positive side of things. It’s not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.