The Weeknd Quotes

I want my music, whether it's sung by other people or sung by myself, to affect the way the Top 40 radio sounds. I want to heavily influence it with things that have come directly from my brain.

Dick Clark really didn't make rock 'n roll safe for America, as many people think.

The whole world has changed much since the '80's. In the united States, rap music and country music dominate radio and that certainly wasn't the case in the early '80's.

Rock in the mainstream culture has lost a lot of its mojo.

I got my influences from '70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released 'Money,' it wouldn't even get played.

I don't see that there are any particular changes in popular music.

When 5150 came out rock was king. Post Nirvana and Pearl Jam 1996 is a different story.

There's always people saying that rock is dead, rock is over. People are always out to kill rock and roll.

I just change with the times. I really don't have a say in what's going on. Music was here before me.

Superficial pop will always exist - there've always been Fabians - but when people like Dire Straits and Bruce Hornsby start having hits, it suggests that there's a revolution going on in music.

We've been gone five years and the best they could come up with was boy bands?

Pop is in a shocking state at the moment.

The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out.

Dance music has pushed its way into the mainstream. Which is good for me.

I think the people who are sitting in their living room doing those, 'Let's take country music back' blogs and all that stuff, that's crazy to me. No one's saying that about rock & roll, and no one sounded like the Beatles since 1960. No one says that about R&B, and no one sounded like the Commodores since 1970.

MTV ruined music for us.

Anyone that thinks 'pop' is a dirty word is living in the '90s.

What did happen to rock music? I think there was a hip-hop takeover.

I'm not in that state of mind that I was back in '86 - hip-hop is not in that state of mind that it was back in '86. Times change. I change.

Well, rock used to be the only game in town in terms of radio and what the kids listen to. Now I think there was a big hip-hop takeover, and pop music, it became mechanical and computer-y.

There's never going to be a new Beatles because we don't consume things in that way anymore.

Unlike a lot of my cohorts from the '80s and '90s who totally blamed the shortness of their careers on bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and whatever, I was very into a lot of those bands.

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.

They say the music you listen to in your formative years stays with you and leaves an impression for the rest of your life. For me, the things that I fell in love with happened in the '70s, when artists were nurtured by record companies and it wasn't about singles.

Country music has to evolve in order to survive.