Debbie Harry Quotes

Hot funk, cold punk, even if it's old junk, it's still rock and roll to me.

It used to be called boogie-woogie, it used to be called blues, used to be called rhythm and blues...It's called rock now.

Rock and roll is a misconception. It should no longer be a term for music.

Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, and many other great jazz musicians objected to their music being called jazz. While the outside world may want to put a label on it, those who create it think of it just as music, and tend not to classify it.

Rock 'n' roll is ridiculous. It's absurd. In the past, U2 was trying to duck that. Now we're wrapping our arms around it and giving it a great big kiss.

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

Hip-hop kind of absorbed rock in terms of the attitude and the whole point of why rock was important music. Young people felt like rock music was theirs, from Elvis to the Beatles to the Ramones to Nirvana. This was theirs; it wasn't their parents'. I think hip-hop became the musical style that embraces that mentality.

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

As the years go by, I realize how unique a style rock music is and how delicate you have to be with it sometimes; otherwise, you turn it into pop music or progressive rock or something else.

If you actually go back and listen to my first album, there are some things on there that are kind of rock 'n' roll.

The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

It's rooted in things that maybe older people or people my age remember as being rock music. But at the same time, I don't think we're stuck in the past or retro. I think we've tried to push ourselves and experiment with what we can call Wilco music.

I would say that I'm very proud that Metallica plays heavy music - but equally proud that we don't think like a heavy-metal band.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.

Rock and roll is catching on all over . . . France . . . England . . . They even have it in Japan, only over there they call it judo.

I'm not technically adept at music, but I'd love to be part of a discussion of where progressive rock ends and country music begins.

I don't care about the word 'pop'. The Beatles were pop; it's just what's popular.

In 1952, Muddy cut the song 'Rollin' Stone.' It was a nationwide success, and the song echoes down through rock n' roll history. Bob Dylan cut a tribute by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called 'Rolling Stone.'

Rock n' roll is dirty, and it's bad, and it's either clever or it's not clever.

As I said to Ringo, I was in a successful Rock N Roll band. He was in a band that changed the world. That's the difference.

I am not a pop musician; I don't want to play bubble-gummy pop stuff.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the '70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the '80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the '90s. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

The biggest question I have is if you're a rock singer or a rock 'n' roll band, or if you're a pop singer... if you've made your way in another genre of music and now you want to make a country record, why? That's my question. Why?

I was 12 in '55 when rock and roll hit. It just completely transformed me.