You’ve got Corey Feldman doing his thing, and the problem is, they’re trying to be pop stars. You can’t compare Salty to any of the other actors out there playing music.
Yeah, I don’t deal with current events or pop culture, and I avoid politics like the plague.
The ’80s were the worst period. You had these horrible pop bands growing their hair and calling themselves metal.
The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.
I tore up my knee break dancing. I have no idea how that happened. Apparently these legs are meant for swimming, but not dancing. I was watching an MTV video, thinking, ‘I can do this.’ Definitely not. I heard a pop. I sat down and it blew up like a watermelon. I had to go to the hospital and get surgery.
A pop star’s career lasts 18 months.
The whole celebrity thing is not something I’m overly interested in. I don’t pop up at parties. It’s just not my thing.
Contemporary art will never achieve the audience of football, pop music, or television, so I think we should stop comparing its possible area of influence to that of big mass-media events.
You have to learn how to act a pop song. You have to find the balance of the pop from the pop song and the lyrical significance of the scene you are in.
I definitely have to admit that I am fairly ignorant, not just to ‘Tron,’ but almost any pop culture thing that I should know, at my age. I grew up without a television and rarely got to see a movie, so I didn’t really see any of that stuff, and I haven’t been able to catch up since.
I know I’m never going to be a big pop star, because I’m not willing to conform.
If I pop off and do something drastic, everyone’s going to realise because they know I’m 50. Anyway, middle-aged women are sensational.
I have a very classic take on fashion. I like my accessories to pop, but in general, my style is pretty classic.
I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called ‘rock and roll.’
I’m a sucker for sad disco pop.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
Pop music should be about young people.
I think pop culture is the greatest subject matter out there – ‘Other People’s Lives,’ as we wrote about on the last Duran Duran album. Most ideas for great songs come from real situations, something your friend said to you the night before, the girl that just left, or something traumatic in your life.
I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band – just for fun – when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.
I embraced being a pop artist, but I like doing it on my own terms, at my own pace.
I come from a world of hip-hop, but I love all types of music, and that’s what Revolt will reflect. It will be home to electronic dance music, pop, hip-hop.
I was a pop freak. I love music. Of course, I knew soul because I grew up in it. Writing it and everything. I love soul. But I love a tune that has some meat in it. Something I could hang my hat on. Because music is universal. Therefore, I felt no boundaries.
Saying you have a political solution is like saying you can write a pop song that’s going to stay at the top of the list forever. I don’t have many illusions about this, but I’m not cynical about it.
The biggest question I have is if you’re a rock singer or a rock ‘n’ roll band, or if you’re a pop singer… if you’ve made your way in another genre of music and now you want to make a country record, why? That’s my question. Why?
The kids out there want something they can relate to, something that’s real; most of that whiny stuff isn’t real. The cheesy pop songs just bore me to death.
A lot of pop music is based on trying to make people remember it so that they’ll buy it. To me, it was not about that.
But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn’t, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.
My songs don’t play on pop radio; they play on black radio.
My folks have played everything from rock, disco, pop, funk, and blues. My dad has always brought and played different genres like jazz, classical, and Latin. With all this in my pocket, I feel I have a taste of everything for my influences.
The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light.
I think right now, you’ve seen these artists pop up over the last decade who’ve flirted with branching together a lot of different kinds of music. Some of them have been huge, and sold millions of records. And I think over time it’s become a little bit of what the industry can be.
I see songs not as a commodity used up when the album goes off the charts, which is often the case with pop songs. I see them as a body of work. Life should be breathed into them.
How many actors have a shot at being a part of something that became a part of pop culture? It’s been very rewarding. I’m not getting the 20 million bucks for the new movies, but at least I’m getting warmth and recognition from people wherever I go.
Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre.
I’ve done all different kinds of genres – doo-wop, pop, funk, gospel, country, jazz, you name it.
I’ve always liked people who know me to like me, because I think I’m quite likeable. But people who make up their minds based on the image in the papers or a voice on a pop record? They’re idiots.
I am totally unapologetic about pop music.
Too pop for punk, too ‘old school’ for the New Wave, Mumps were a ’70s era New York rock band, out of time.
I don’t know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised; it’s made to please the largest audience possible. I also compose to please a large audience, but when you listen to my music, you understand that I have studied and applied the whole history of composition.
I’m not really a country singer, although I did make a couple albums and love its simple, straight-from-the-heart approach, but I have always sung a lot of jazz, show tunes, pop tunes, gospel and blues.
Pop music means everything to me. I’ve been listening to pop since I was kid, running home from school to watch Britney Spears and Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera music videos, and it felt like it was a world to escape to for me personally.
When you’re part of a pop phenomenon, you have so many opinions shoved down your throat.
A lot of comic conventions go way beyond comic books and include other parts of pop culture, like celebrities and science fiction and movies and books. So I go to them either as a celebrity, or as a fan, because I’m a big sci-fi geek.
And of course, pop music is all about memorability and simplicity and positive messages and a little dash of joy.
I feel that the music that I do is somewhat of a lost art and it’s not as popular as dance or pop music and people are not as interested in it. But it’s something that I believe in and I feel that it’s needed, so that’s why I do it and I will keep doing it until everybody hears it and gets it.
Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone’s game. No other pop auteur can touch her right now for emotional excess or musical reach – her punk is so punk, her disco is so disco. The red sequins on her guitar match the ones on her microphone, her shoes and 80 percent of the crowd.
Pop music for me was definitely escapist, but never studious.
Starship was a whole different thing. It was pop rock. It made more money and had more hit songs than Airplane. There was no cultural or social ethic behind it. For me, it was like selling out. I was the only one selling out. The rest enjoyed doing what they were doing.
The only thing that exists to me is commercial pop music.
Pop music is a fashion, and fashions come and go. The public retires you as their tastes change.
I’d like to do a pop album with an R and B influence. I definitely want to have those big ballads with the uptempo hits as well.
I used to be afraid to use the word ‘pop’ to describe my music, but underneath my tough, bad-girl sound, there’s some fun.
Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later and it means something to us, and it always will do. It’s incredibly important.
I am not a pop musician; I don’t want to play bubble-gummy pop stuff.
I tell myself, ‘You’re great, you’re powerful, you’re strong. You’re the greatest, most powerful, strongest fighter in the world.’ I acknowledge my greatness. I bow down before my greatness. I inflate myself like that, and then I pop the balloon in a single sentence by saying: You can be beaten.
