Sade Adu Quotes

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to.

Music, Rock and Roll music especially, is such a generational thing. Each generation must have their own music, I had my own in my generation, you have yours, everyone I know has their own generation.

I grew up on Loretta Lynn and Dusty Springfield. I remember lying about it; it wasn't cool to listen to country when I was 12.

I hate the term 'emo.' It turned into this genre of music, when all music, if you connect with it, is emotional.

I'm a country singer, and I'm comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don't understand why it's that big a deal.

I don't like the word 'urban' because I think it's a bit of a generalisation and they use it to class music, but I don't think it's a word that necessarily classes music.

When I first released music, and no one knew what I looked like, I would read comments like: 'I've never heard anything like this before; it's not in a genre.' And then my picture came out six months later: now she's an R&B singer.

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?

I can't tell you what genre Maroon 5 is in. I don't know if they're rock or pop or alternative. I don't know what they are. I have a hard time separating that stuff. I just know what I like when I hear it.

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

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?

Of course, I grew up hearing Latin music but, to be honest, aside from my personal circumstances, like most kids I wanted to rebel against what I considered to be such old fashioned fare.

Am I R&B because I'm black? Am I pop because I have a song called 'Milkshake'? Or can I just be who the hell I am? Good Lord, people make it seem like we're doing heart transplants here, but we're just making music!

Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

Growing up, I didn't really like folk music - I wasn't a fan of Bob Dylan. I grew up mostly listening to rap and hip-hop; it was this new form of music.

Where I come from it was really unheard of to be at a party and someone says, 'What kind of music do you make?', and you say, 'Pop music.' You may as well have 'I'm not cool' stamped on your forehead.

I listen to all kinds of music. I love underground, new music that's popping.

In America, music is more tightly categorized.

In the future I think the labels on most pop music are going to go. Everyone keeps jumping into everyone else's space.

Rock is young music, it is youth oriented. It just speaks for a generation.

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.

My cousin used to make fun of me for liking stuff like C+C Music Factory. I didn't have any tapes; I just liked their song on the radio. We liked that because that was what we had access to.

So many young kids are fickle when it comes to music. There comes a time when you're not cool again.

I think what people get confused about is that they want to label me as this EDM girl, but a lot of this stuff is genre-less.