George Thorogood Quotes

I hate genres. I think they're just marketing labels.

I don't know why people have to categorize things in music under music. It's music and it's music and it's music. When you start putting genres on things, I think it's completely ridiculous, and I hate that.

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.

I don't know why I keep saying this, and I don't know why I keep using their names... And I'm not dogging them. I'm not slandering them. I'm not saying they are bad musicians. But how can Taylor Swift or Justin Timberlake win for R&B and funk? They are pop singers.

When I sing a pop song, I'm a pop singer. When I sing a country song, I'm a country singer. I've been very lucky to cross over, because by doing that, you can't be pigeonholed.

I don't really concentrate on Urban AC or whatever. I don't concentrate on genres or how people section off songs for radio.

I hate how things must be classified. How this is applied to musicians implies that they somehow contrive their products and have studied the demographics of the audience.

My songs don't play on pop radio; they play on black radio.

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!

Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'

I really like the old stuff that I cut my musical teeth on, and I loved it when the industry was just like that, without really a genre. Today, country radio's more aimed at a demographic than a genre. It just softens everything.

The way popular music is categorized and formatted cuts down on everyone's options. And although people don't talk about it, there are a lot of issues of race determining musical categories of what's rock, R&B, or even folk. It ends up restricting creativity.

When I got my record deal at Atlantic, at the time, 'indie' wasn't a style of music: it was a kind of label. And I think, eventually, the bands that ended up on those labels began to be branded as 'indie bands,' and then it became a genre.

I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.

The mainstream media tend to lump everything together. To them, there's no difference between Madonna, the Rolling Stones, or whatever.

I agree that it's absurd to call a category of music 'female-fronted metal,' because if you look at Otep or Epica or Arch Enemy, we don't sound anything alike.

If I were not a black artist but I was still singing, playing guitar, and singing ballads that are spiritual and cerebral, I'd be easier to market because people accept that from white female singer-songwriters faster.

I never considered myself like a pop musician or rock star, because that didn't really exist when I started.

"Country" has become a marketing term. I see myself as a songwriter.

I hate the business part of music. Music is just like the streets. There's loyal and disloyal people, people saying one thing and then don't do it.

I want people to get out of that nasty habit of needing a label. Every genre for each song is different.

I hate album covers where people are just smiling so big. It's like a neon sign that says PLEASE COME BUY ME.

I hate labels because it should be just music. I don't see anything wrong with disco. Call it anything. It's music.

All these ways we classify things as R&B and hip-hop and rock... It's bullshit. It's all music. If you put yourself in that box, then you won't be able to hear that it's all music at its soul.