Mika Quotes

Many elitists hate rap as much as they hate country, though they don't like to admit it for fear of appearing racially insensitive.

When I'd tell people I like country music they'd get this look on their faces. People were kind of ashamed of country.

Dire Straits is a great band. Someone tells you they like 'Brothers in Arms' and immediately you know they're a stupid annoying git.

When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art.

Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.

I used to be a jazz snob, believe it or not. I sort of turned my nose up at anything more commercial.

The classical music world is so snobbish.

Don't get me wrong - intellectual snobbery is vulgar and gauche.

Is it racist to prefer country music over the blues? Or is it simply a classic case of tribal antipathy toward the unfamiliar, in favor of gravitating to what you know?

I've never felt opera was a party I've been invited to, and maybe I've got a bit of a chip on my shoulder about it.

People speak with enormous pomposity and arrogance about music.

The most wretched people in the world are those who tell you they like every kind of music 'except country.' People who say that are boorish and pretentious at the same time.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

That which we call a snob by any other name would still be snobbish.

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.

People do look at it as an insult that I say I don't listen to country music, which cracks me up.

I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.

The only people who didn't like The Monkees were the French, and they don't even like themselves, so what's the point?

I resent the implication that I'm less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

You can never judge any music by their audience. That's the main reason people in England have a prejudice against someone like Skrillex. You judge people by their music. That's always been first and foremost.

There is a lot of snobbery towards pop music, to me and pop in general - it's kind of a despised art form.