Chingy Quotes

Music changes, and I'm gonna change right along with it.

If you're in pop music, you've got to deal with the changing of the guard every few years. By the time the '70s arrived, I was well aware of the cyclical nature of the game. Pop music is a creature of the moment; it thrives on the mood of its time. Either you hook into that or you're not going to be part of it.

I think being a little older and a little more determined and being a little more evolved in my case and maturity in the kind of music I was doing and how I was doing it really helped to keep me grounded and with an audience that could appreciate what I was doing, who grew with me and evolved with me and kept me alive and around.

If you oversaturate the market with singles, then people will get sick of you.

I think our music reflects us and has grown with us, and as our fans have grown, too.

So few hip-hop artists have ever advanced. Their songs on their seventh, eighth albums sound exactly like the songs on their first album. More than an artist, I'm a real person-and real people grow. And I wanna just sing my growth.

Six months is the most you can ask of any fan in this day and age, with the Internet and all these new artists. I understand that my music is in a lot of mediums. Some people want me to make an R&B album. Some people want me to never sing again. I just don't want people to be able to draw comparisons between my old songs and my new ones.

People who say that music is dead or hip-hop is dead are refusing to evolve.

A songwriter's heart is pure when they have the desire to keep digging deeper into music. And invariably, when you dig deeper it always leads you into the past.

Radio is so cutthroat, but I do feel like the music industry is structured so differently than it used to be. I'm amazed and in awe of artists who can build a parallel universe that's so big and clearly defined that the mainstream finally has to pay attention.

Record labels today are much less patient: Artists have a bad record, and they're gone.

I've just recently started doing the promo bits for the new album, and the funny thing is that the people who come to talk to me about these things seem to be getting younger. It's like the people who like the music are all young kids and they're on top of you - they know all about what you're doing, and they're excited and animated about it. So it's a lot of fun.

Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.

I think these days, as an artist, you have to be slightly entrepreneurial. ...Nobody really sells records anymore.

These days and times you can't do eclectic records. In the '60s you could, but not anymore.

A Grammy is a wonderful thing; all of a sudden you're given a new audience but, like anything, you have to be able to grow with these songs if you really want a long artistic career.

The life of a rock & roll band will last as long as you can look down into the audience and see yourself.

Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting-places - like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal.

With Metavoid, I wanted to move forward with the Lustmord sound, rather than recreating past works such as Heresy or Black Stars, I wanted to create a sound that was new, but which was also unmistakably Lustmord. It's for others to decide if I failed or succeeded.

Clearly, things are definitely changing in big ways as far as the way we consume music, listen to music, and what we expect from music.

When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers.

Once you fall into habits, I think, you're dead as an artist. You have to challenge yourself and never rest on your laurels, never think about what you've done in the past.

So many artists who came out during that time, including myself, were able to get on radio. New forms of singer-songwriters developed out of that.

I want to grow up with my audience. I don't expect to be getting through to the younger pop crowd. I learned that from Paul Simon.

There's so much music out there, and so many different styles that I've been influenced by, so each album reflects some of that knowledge or influence that I've had.