I love jazz and pop rock and country. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Anne Murray – if I hear something really great… I want to be a part of it.
I’d love to be a pop idol. Of course, my groupies are now between 40 and 50.
I’ve always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.
My dad’s quite a conservative person, and he brought me up to be very questioning of the commercial world. He looked down on pop culture. I definitely got the impression that pop was evil and that Britney Spears was evil.
I’ve never looked at myself as this pop candy type.
Actually, I find it embarrassing being a pop star. I prefer it when people just treat me like anybody else, although occasionally there is a side of me, which is indulgent and I expect certain things because of my position. It’s one of the perks.
There’s quite a few artists that didn’t pop off until they were a little older – Rick James being one.
For better or worse, I’ve always been curious musically. Whether it’s opera or Judy Garland or pop, I’ve deliberately sought those things out. I’ve never wanted to do the same things over and over. Some think I’ve accomplished what I set out to do, and others consider me a dilettante.
I wanted to have a go at a pop career. My first single, ‘Baby I Don’t Care’, was a hit, and the second, ‘Bye Bye Boy’, reached the Top 20.
When you think about it, Adolf Hitler was the first pop star.
The thing that I love about pop music is the simplicity and the directness of it.
I was playing legit snare with a traditional grip, not a matched grip. After I broke my left wrist, I couldn’t hit a snare drum anymore. From the age of 13 to 17, I couldn’t really get a pop on the snare drum. I would hit it, and my wrist would almost shatter.
Well, I’m not sure what pop psychology is, but I don’t like it.
I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn’t matter as much, and not TV – it was all about pop music. In the era when I started – which was the early ’60s – it was all about singles leading to albums.
The biggest crime in England is to rise above your station. It’s fine to be a pop star. ‘Oh, it’s great, lots of fun, aren’t they sweet, these pop stars! But to think you have anything to say about how the world should work? What arrogance!’
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular – typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings.
People always want to learn how to booty pop like Fifth Harmony, so that’s our signature.
I love many kinds of music: world music, jazz, classical, pop.
What I’m bringing to the pop table is that I’m not pretentious.
I tend to latch on to things pretty obsessively for awhile. I listened to Russian pop music exclusively for almost five years. It’s weird.
I think the sheer number of pop stars has kind of drowned out, somewhat, our interest. We’re just submerged.
I think of myself as a performance artist. I hate being called a pop star. I hate that.
I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song ‘Radio Gaga.’
I love pop culture. I love to be inside of it, and step outside and look back in.
I’m totally convinced I can write the perfect pop song.
In Fall Out Boy, we were all playing with our pop punk influences, so that was always within that kind of framework.
If pop culture is a pool, it never hurts to dive into the deep end once in a while.
When I was growing up, Brandy was TV star, reality star, a pop star, a Cover girl, Grammy winner, had her own Brandy doll, and was the first African American to play Disney princess Cinderella. Most importantly, she is a survivor. Many only judge and remember a person’s most recent failure.
Why can’t you write a great pop song when you are 85? Maybe you can.
Dick Clark was a really great influence in my career; he helped me a lot with his whole organization, and they were awesome to me at all different points – but one thing that I really disagreed with him on was when he said that what I do, pop music, is a disposable art form.
‘Time after Time’ is one of the best pop songs ever written, in my opinion. It’s an incredible, beautiful, timeless song.
In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.
When you come to L.A. as a kid with your mom, you’re lured into doing things that you think are cool and fun and a good idea, but they’re cheesy and awful. And recording a pop single was one of them.
There’s this bubblegum pop thing which is prevalent now that we haven’t had before. People’s ears are slightly de-tuned; they’ve been exposed to this weird synthetic, implausibly upbeat, Mickey Mouse stuff which I think is just weird; it’s not really a human sound.
I wanted to live where I could pop to the bar that Humphrey Bogart took Lauren Bacall to, or the little restaurant where Charlie Chaplin had a booth.
I studied fashion at the London College of Fashion. I get involved in it as part of my own styling, so if I wasn’t a pop star maybe a fashion buyer or a stylist.
I have an unabashed adoration of cheesy pop music.
I’m definitely a pop artist at heart.
Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, ‘What kind of music do you make?’, and you say, ‘Pop music.’ You may as well have ‘I’m not cool’ stamped on your forehead.
I’m listening to a lot of Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and Rihanna. A lot of pop female artists. I have to say I’m pretty well-versed in the pop female category.
You have to be respectful of pop culture, because people interpret it in the way they want.
Probably the biggest bring-down in my life was being in a pop group and finding out just how much it was like everything it was supposed to be against.
I think the stuff that plays on the radio, the majority of it is for teenagers, which is okay. That’s what pop radio is about. And some of it is great, and some of it is not.
I’m a businesswoman. I am a music lover. I like for people to like my music. When you listen to top 40 radio, you hear pop stuff. You hear rock stuff. You hear all these different influences.
As a kid, I watched every Madonna documentary and tour. I was obsessed with her – and with any pop star of the ’80s.
I think it’s hard to put a finger on my music. My music has always been an amalgamation of everything I listen to, which includes everything and anything under the sun. Hip-hop to country to R&B to pop, all the things I’m inspired by find a way into what I do.
I love to listen to pop music and I admire people who do that, but I don’t think I would ever be a very good pop star. I always leave that singing voice for the shower! I wouldn’t put it out in the world!
Pop music, disco music, and heavy metal music is about shutting out the tensions of life, putting it away.
I was just thinking of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and how young they were when they died. I would like to be a pop icon who survives. I would like to be a living icon.
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.
You need a bit more to be a pop star than just a good voice.
Anybody who thinks pop music’s easy should try to make a pop single and find out that it isn’t.
I pop gum. My parents get so annoyed with me. I know my dad wishes he never taught me how to do that.
I’m always looking to rock out. But it isn’t really about rocking out versus being mellow, in terms of your personal satisfaction. In the end, you just want to be good. When you look at something that’s really good, it might be Iggy Pop or it might be Leonard Cohen. Whatever it is, you want it to be really good.
My primary influences were the best jazz players from the 50’s and 60’s and later some of the pop people from the same time period along with the better of the well known blues musicians.
I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.
I progressed through so many different styles of music through my teen years, both as a player and a vocalist, particularly the jazz and pop of the early 20th Century.
I don’t really have a favorite genre. I could listen to a rock song, a metal song, jazz, pop music, whatever. For me, whatever style it is, it always depends on the chord progression, the lyrics, and the melody used.
Mom and Pop were proud of my popularity, but from their point of view, show business was no way to make a living.
These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you’ll find that there’s mostly working-class people.
