Skepta Quotes

They love soul music in the U.K.

It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?

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.

I love British bands.

When I was 13, listening to Choice FM, I would listen to a lot of R&B from America, and whenever a British person tried to do it, it didn't really work, they just sounded like they were trying to copy that whole style. Now the music sounds British, something real rather than an imitation.

My grandma said - when I was really young and I'd sing along to the radio - why do you sing in an American accent? I guess it was because a lot of the music I was listening to had American vocalists.

The American intelligentsia has been pretty secular for a long time. There have always been figures like Oprah Winfrey, let's put it that way.

I didn't look up to only pop stars, but I did look up to Adele, Amy Winehouse, Grimes, Robyn, Joni Mitchell, Norah Jones, M.I.A., Coldplay, Keane, and more.

In British music, you have indie, rock... Grime is now one of those pillars. It's a foundation of British music.

I have different sounds... I don't want to be just that girl that sings reggaeton or trap music.

I came to London during what was called the second British invasion. The music was from Britain, the fashion was from Britain, everything was from Britain, so I knew I had to be in Britain.

We've never adopted Americanisms. We are a very British band from a very British cultural scene. We fly that flag and that is something I enjoy.

Before Cliff (Richard) and The Shadows, there had been nothing worth listening to in British music.

Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like a definition of pop to me.

Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

Pop culture is the scaffold we all carry around with us.

I think the '80s created me, in a way, when I look back on that time, but I don't necessarily think that a lot of my choices, and a lot of things that I did, and a lot of things that happened to me - or I let happen to me - were about that decade.

I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies.

In 1908 Handy didn't know anything about the blues and he doesn't know anything about jazz and stomps to this day. I myself figured out the peculiar form of mathematics and harmonies that was strange to all the world but me.

Culture is so much faster and so much more effective than anything else. If you go on a march, you march for a couple hours and it might be on the news that night, but if it happens culturally, it happens forever. Everywhere in the world, that TV show is being played. Someone is downloading it illegally. It's blowing someone else's mind. Culture marches so quickly, and it's a language we all understand.

People ask me if I'm influenced by British music, and I suppose I grew up listening to mostly British music - from new wave stuff through to heavy metal. Like, when I got into metal, it was Black Sabbath. I never really got into a lot of American rock. I appreciate some of it, but not much! Most of the great new wave music was coming out of Britain, and Germany. So maybe those influences have made their way into my music, and perhaps that's why I have this connection with people in Europe. But maybe it's something cosmic.

I am so grateful for One Day At A Time, even though for years and years and years people would go, "Oh, you were on One Day At A Time." I [am on the show] for about seven months and then this haunts me for the rest of my life. No, I had no regrets.

Michael Jackson doesn't really belong on this planet. He's the most important figure in the history of music. He'll be remembered far longer than George Bush will. 200 years from now, people will be talking about Michael Jackson, and no one's going to mention George Bush.

The mainstream usually follows trends, it seldom sets them except for a few films.