Meshell Ndegeocello Quotes

It's tragic that you can define a whole movement in music by gender alone. People are like, 'Oh, look, another quirky girl.'

People make such a big deal about how people in bands look, especially if you're a girl.

They sign a bunch of women, and they call it a movement. I don't like the way women in music have been identified as women first and musicians second.

Nobody asks me about what male musicians I think about; I only ever get asked about females.

There are so many times that, as a woman in the music industry, you're asked questions no male musician would ever be asked.

You know, I try not to think too much about women guitarists versus men guitarists; the world does that for me.

I know, being a band that's mostly gay and has women in it, I just think that there are the male icon bands: they are always - and they deserve it - but they are always touted as, 'These guys are heavy-duty.' I think bands, because we have a sense of humor, we are not always taken as seriously.

Tejano music was hard for us because I was a girl. My dad had a lot of problems while trying to set up shows for us or presentations because there are a lot of men who don't think that women can get the attention of the public. But ... wrong!

I always think that people think that women in music are always angry. I'm not angry. Rock 'n' roll music made by men is so much more over-the-top aggressive than when a women says "you" and they're screaming it, it's like, 'Oh my God!' I'm like, 'Have you heard rock music made by men?'

That was exactly why people didn't want to give us any kind of life, because we were threatening their status quo, and they just didn't want to have room for girls playing rock 'n' roll. It bothered them. First, people just tried to get around it by saying, "Oh, wow, isn't that cute? Girls playing rock 'n' roll!," and when we said, "Yeah, right, this isn't a phase; it's what we want to do with our lives," it became, "Oh! You must be a bunch of sluts. You dykes, you whores." That's what it became. Then it became a name-calling contest.

Guys pit female rappers against each other because female rappers - if you haven't noticed of late - are a lot more interesting than guys.

Men are allowed to write songs about people and women are allowed to write songs about women.

People put stock in someone being in a 'girl group,' but we don't say that a band is a 'man group.'

I grew up in a world that told girls they couldn't play rock 'n' roll.

Some boys accepted me, some didn't. And my family had comments made to them. Brazil is still a very macho society, and sports are mainly for boys, so people would say to them: 'What is this girl doing? Why is she always out there in the soccer games with the boys?'

I don't know if comedy is a male sport. I always wondered that.

Most executives are male, so it's always sort of their vision of stuff. I'm constantly fighting against that even when I play the wife or the girlfriend or the best friend. I always try my hardest to bring as much layering in and not make things stereotypical, but it's hard.

The image of Ireland is projected as a male image in the acting world, similar to the way that the word of Ireland is male dominated.

There aren't good roles for women: the female parts aren't developed: the women are serving the men.

In a lot of TV shows out there, the women are the weak ones, and the men are the strong ones.

Women get the attention when we get into the men's arena, and that's sad.

This is still a man's profession, with a lot of men who intellectually and emotionally have not accepted that the military could be women's work.

Many societies have educated their male children on the simple device of teaching them not to be women.

And as I started reaching deeper I realized that most of the blues of that day was done by men. Women just didn't have the nerve.

I won't say that women belong in the kitchen, but they don't belong in the dugout.