Richie Havens Quotes

I can't tell you what genre Maroon 5 is in. I don't know if they're rock or pop or alternative. I don't know what they are. I have a hard time separating that stuff. I just know what I like when I hear it.

Some people say I make hip-hop. Others see me as doing EDM. Some people might look at me as a trap artist, but I'm not really stuck to any of those.

I think what people get confused about is that they want to label me as this EDM girl, but a lot of this stuff is genre-less.

I've never really gotten into the whole labels thing. There were times I would cover a pop song, and people would say 'You sound really country.' I gave up on that whole thing a long time ago.

I really love music that's on the periphery of not fitting into a clear genre. I felt like I was constantly being described as something I didn't really feel like I identified with.

People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B, or pop, and it's interesting to me. I'm just making music.

None of my dudes I chill with are rappers. I don't put us as rappers. We're all artists.

When you label something a singer-songwriter record, you cover many genres.

I don't really feel like a rock artist, but I guess in the small category of the world of music genres, that's where I fall in because I've got a guitar.

When 'Raw Like Sushi' came out in the U.S., I wasn't considered to be black enough. They didn't really know where to put me. The music wasn't 'black black' sounding. It wasn't R&B; it wasn't straight up hip-hop, although obviously in that dimension and world.

Bruce Springsteen's a rock star. Elton John is a rock star. I'm a folk musician. Honestly, I think that's true.

I don't know about folk music. I play guitar, so there's a feeling I make folk music.

I am not a dancehall artist, and I am not a reggae artist.

Music is music; you don't have to put a label on it.

I like to listen the blues and some classical.

Some people think I'm a rock 'n' roll musician and some think I'm a jazz musician but, for me, there is no difference.

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did, and I'd say, 'Well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical' - but that makes no sense to anyone.

For some reason I've been labeled that and it's fine, but there are a lot of other artists that sing real traditional stuff, so I don't know why they picked me. That's what I've always done.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

I don't really know what 'folk music' means anymore.

I don't think of myself as a folk singer per se, but I really like blues and string-band music. When I started listening to records when I was a teenager, the folk boom was going on.

When I started off in England, HMV or Tower Records would come to meetings and be, like, 'We just don't know what this genre is.' I don't really fit in between Rihanna and Beyonce.

Yeah; I'm a much better blues player than anybody knows, but being in the kind of group I'm in, we were always trying to make popular records.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.