Q-Tip Quotes

I grew up when Chris Brown was, like, an icon. He was my ringtone when I was in high school.

I think hip-hop has changed. When I first came out, hip-hop was more of a kind of way to learn about new places, new things. What are kids doing on the East coast, what are kids doing here. Then it left that and is like a party mode. I think it's going back to people wanting to get messages and wanting to learn things from the music.

People love teen movies because everyone can relate.

In 1962 I was 17, so I was definitely watching the dance shows on television.

Between Prince and my dad's fusion-jazz records, I didn't have a choice in being funky.

My mother's records were formative for me, but when I became a teenager, I wanted to find songs that she wasn't hip to. She was so hip, though, that I had to go outside rock n' roll - so for about 10 years, I only listened to hip-hop, house and techno.

I think the most exciting thing is that you expect people our age to know the music, but actually a lot of kids know the music, and if anything is left, we have left really good music, and that's the important part, not the mop-tops or whatever.

Anti-parent music seems to be all the pop-rock market wants.

Teen pop will never die as long as there are teens and popular music. It just takes a different head.

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

I just went to your typical public schools, and my dad would take us to the movies every week, or he'd buy scalped tickets to San Antonio Spurs games. I remember I was four or five years old and my parents, who were very young, took us to see The Police in Austin, and Iggy Pop opened.

My dad sat me in front of the TV, and instead of putting on Nick Jr. or something, he put me in front of 'Jailhouse Rock' and all the Elvis movies.

Each kind of generation of bands forgets how they got here. Waylon Jennings came out and they're like, 'That's not Patsy Cline.' And everyone panicked, like, 'I don't know what happened to country music, but this isn't it.'

I had a very thorough grounding in music; I'd grown up around songs. My parents listened to a lot of music. My dad was majorly into jazz, which was absolutely a big influence on me, even if it was more subconsciously as a kid.

The kids today have these fresh faces. It's like they're on pins and needles, waiting to see what I'm going to do. They've never seen me. In the 1960s, those were hippies. They were wired up already. The kids today know me because I've worked with Jeff Tweedy and other young producers.

I was into all kinds of music as a teen - country music, because my dad was in a band that played country, and whatever my sister and brother were into.

I can't tell you how many things I've worked on where I sat on it for a few years, and then somebody else did something very similar. Whether it's some weird vocal effect you hear on another record, or a drum beat, or even a song title, a subject matter, or a mixture of different kinds of music.

When I hear music that parents hate, or older musicians hate, I know that's the new music. When I hear older people saying, 'I hate Rap or Techno' I rush to it.

When I was a teenager, my dad used to call me 'Hollywood' because I wore sunglasses all the time, even at night. Cue song.

There are bands that I got into when I was 15, when I was mad at my dad and just wanted to be different. I don't think I'd give those bands half a chance now. But I hold some kind of nostalgia for them that I won't let go. Bands like Minor Threat and Black Flag.

The music you love when you're a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it's all over the score of 'Hamilton.'

I was an MTV guy back in the day.

I had collages in my bedroom when I was a teenager.

I would say I was an all-American teenager.

Jockeying for a popularity position has been a valorized teen tradition since the notion of a discrete teen stage of life was invented.