Nas Quotes

I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.

People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

What I do isn't black music; it's just my music.

I think I'm making music that's pretty universal.

'My Life' is not an autobiography. It's just music.

I'm just experimenting with every different type of music you can imagine and seeing where my voice lies and what sounds best. I think when I do finally do the album it will be very eclectic - just loads of different stuff on it. That's what I am hoping.

I understand that, but this disc shows the type of music that I've always liked and wanted to make.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

I want to put my vibe and my feel of music into an album and have people from different places around the world feel that and hear that.

My music is pretty versatile; I have a lot of genres and styles. I don't think I should be pigeonholed into one thing. So we'll see where my career goes.

So, maybe you don't see blues so much in Styx's music but it is definitely part of Tommy's early music.

I try to make my music have the quiet spaces of folk, the intimacy, and the energy of rock.

I love music, I love all kinds of music, particularly jazz. Jazz is an extension of America. There's no other country in the world that could have produced jazz.

No, there's something about the sing-song cadence of children's music that has its place in rock.

I think it's hard to put a finger on my music. My music has always been an amalgamation of everything I listen to, which includes everything and anything under the sun. Hip-hop to country to R&B to pop, all the things I'm inspired by find a way into what I do.

Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

I think my music generally transcends a lot of genres.

We didn't go for music that sounded like blues, or jazz, or rock, or Led Zeppelin, or Rolling Stones. We didn't want to be like any of the other bands.

Hip-hop is the only music in the world where you can take any instrument and make it hip hop. It's anybody's music. It's what you make of it. That's for anything you do in life.

The biggest misconception about us is that we're just a rock band. We think our music is a cross-section of many genres; a hybrid of what the six of us have grown up on.

It was really terrific but Foreigner was nothing like Yes and that style did not suit our music.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.