Pop comes from the word ‘popular,’ which means that it could be anything that appeals to any group of people. When you talk about general masses, I think there’s elements in every kind of music that can reach a broad audience.
Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.
In both pop and disco, the meaning of the lyrics is not too important. I have nothing I feel I particularly want to say.
You can try to be catchy without being slick, poppy without being pop, and you can be uplifting without being pompous. Because we’re sometimes playing quieter stuff, it’s hard to sound like we’re trying to change things, but we wanted to be a reaction against soulless rubbish.
A lot of pop people out there are cool, but they overdo it.
Here in England, everyone’s a pop star, innit, whereas in America they believe in the term artist.
I want to make a pop album – something more upbeat than my stuff was in the ’90s.
Prince is one of my biggest idols of all time, and he’s the real King of Pop.
A lot of what I’ve done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise – the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there’s a pearl inside.
You know the question: ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ Answer: ‘Practise?’ Well, in my case, I got there by not practising. I didn’t finish my music degree. And when I got into the pop world, I decided not to conform because I figured that the point of being an artist was that you shouldn’t be like anyone else.
In the early days I had a very black-and-white view of everything. I think that’s kind of natural for anyone who’s just embraced Islam – or any religion – as a convert. It was important for me to duck out of the fast and furious life I’d been living as a pop star. I was in a different mood.
Thierry Mugler is about the power of glamour and walking straight into the future. He’s been a god for successive generations in the fashion industry. He fused pop and high fashion, told a story in style and combined fantasy with reality.
I feel comfortable in my pop shoes. They let me walk in any direction. I like to go from one extreme to the other. One day I feel that I want to do a song with reggaeton influence, I do it. The next day I feel I need to do a song with rock elements to it, I do it.
Nowadays in pop, there’s not a lot of men that are singing big and loud and high – it’s not as common as it once was.
I get a lot of fan mail addressed to Bilbo and sometimes Sir Bilbo – it’s hardly ever addressed to Ian Holm, in fact. My business manager drafts the replies, and then I pop in to the office and sign them, ‘Bilbo!’
Some cats, Iggy Pop, they’re going to always have that hunger.
I think there’s a good pop song in pretty much anything.
I’m not a pop star.
When I’m in the car sometimes it’s like, ‘Yeah, man, just put on the pop music.’ You know what I mean? I don’t want to listen to Tom Waits.
I feel beautiful without makeup on, but when I do put makeup on, it just gives me this extra pop.
Do I listen to pop music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?
I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music – jazz, swing, Motown, pop – and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.
In their heyday, the Pet Shop Boys were the Interpol of the Eighties, dressing up to sing really weird pop songs about lust and loneliness in the big city. They’re low-pro now, not retro-worshipped in the manner of Depeche Mode, New Order, or The Cure, but you can hear the reason why – these guys are too sad.
I have my diehard R&B fans on one side of the spectrum and my diehard pop and dance fans on the other side of the spectrum.
I don’t care about the word ‘pop’. The Beatles were pop; it’s just what’s popular.
I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.
When I was about 18, I really started diving into Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer Trio and some of those things that have jazz elements but also a pop feel.
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture.
We just made music that we liked and that people liked in Korea, and then people outside of Korea began to like it – in the same way that we hear pop songs from outside of Korea and enjoy them too.
President Obama likes to talk about the Buffett Rule. Well, here’s a Buffett Rule that all Americans should be able to support: mom and pop businesses should not pay a higher tax rate than Fortune 500 corporations like Warren Buffett’s.
What’s good is that my music is different from everyone else’s. It’s got the soul element, like Duffy, but it’s not very retro. It’s a contemporary, pop, fresh sound. That’s what makes it different.
Music and fashion have had a kind of incestuous relationship since the Fifties. It started with people like Elvis Presley and pop icons like James Dean. Then it exploded in the MTV days. Now, with the Internet, it’s instantaneous.
I’ve learned a lot about my voice, and about things I can do with it. Maybe that’s why my sound has become a little more pop.
Pop music I have always loved best.
I know I’m a pop star. But sometime I’d like to be a rock star.
I’d love to pop back into ‘Being Human’ as Adam. I love the character so much. I’ve never really played a character like that. I’m always playing the geek, so to play a kid who is very energetic when he wants to be, and who is always trying to get the girls, was really cool.
Every day I’d come home after school, pop the hood of my mom’s car, put alligator clips on the battery, and wire into the house and go play on my computer. If I used it for too long, I’d wear down the car battery, and my mom would be all mad at me the next day.
In general, I don’t know when inspiration will pop up.
There should be a place and the space for all pop.
There aren’t many sites like 4chan where you can pop in every hour and see all new stuff.
It was very interesting in my world, because I grew up as a fan and I did not know that there was a thing called R&B, pop, country, classical – I just knew that I loved music.
I don’t want to sing boring pop songs – I want to sing songs that are meaningful to me.
Most of the people who write pop music were outsiders at some time in their life.
I can take the steel guitars and fiddles off, we can make it a little more pop, cover ideas that are a little less cowboy. But you got to look at yourself in the mirror and ask, whose flag you are under? For Garth Brooks, I’m steel, fiddles, red, white and blue.
As a pop star, you don’t have to be that smart for people to think you’re intelligent.
Although I do use some of my psychology training in comedy, but it’s more like pop psychology, not a course of treatment or anything. To me, it’s more like social intelligence.
I think every artist subconsciously wants to evolve themselves. Sometimes they get stuck in ruts because of pop culture, peer pressure, stuff like that. But what excites me most is exploring my own musical insights and expanding upon them.
It was just the next logical step from making succinct pop songs. What do you do after that? You make pop songs that are longer and more epic, that push the envelope. Imagine your favourite song, or something that you play over and over in the car, except that you don’t have to start it over as much.
I coined this term ‘freedom thru limitation’ back in the ’90s because I was sick of art being treated like pop, because of this boring ‘anything can be art’ theory.
Obviously I got known for some other songs early on, and some of those were rock’n’roll songs. Some of them were melodic pop songs. And I’ve done lots of different things, as you know, but every so often I get drawn back.
The title song of David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ is one of his handful of classics, a bizarre mixture of social comment, run-on lyric style, English pop and American soul.
My earliest memories as a child are listening to Beatles records, and they are a big part of how I’ve learned to write pop songs.
I was a little tomboy, growing up, but we had to go to the library every weekend if we wanted some form of entertainment. And I would gravitate towards the Shirley Temple, Judy Garland section of the library, and I would just pop that in and watch on replay because kids can watch movies over and over again.
It’s a tough life being a pop star. You know, at the end of the day when you’ve paid all the bills and put the kids through college and that, you know, there’s only enough left for a small island off the South Pacific.
It’s part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.
Because I didn’t have any queer, lesbian, female role models I hated my own femininity and had to look deep within myself to create an identity that worked for me. Pop culture just doesn’t hand us enough variety to choose from.
I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I’m waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.
Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other.
