Joe Bonamassa Quotes

I think people must wonder how a white girl like me became a blues guitarist. The truth is, I never intended to do this for a living.

I like to make music, I like rap music. Even if I'm white, I support that music. If I want to support it or any other white kid wants to support it more power to them.

Sometimes, growing up, I tried to be very Latina; I would change my voice... experiment with my hair a lot, trying to figure out who I was in a primarily white school.

I never thought I'd be in a position where people would be talking about my sexuality and saying how good I look in underwear.

Did people think I sounded black? Totally, but that was a marketing tool as well, but also this is how I grew up and these are my influences.

For Bobby and I to sing R&B and sound black was probably the stupidest thing we could do. White radio stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were black. Black stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were white. Any time you break ground, you go against the grain.

I am not sure that the inner world of teenage girls has changed. What's most important to kids today is still the same stuff.

When I did 'Baby Got Back,' I did it to be unpopular.

I have nothing to hide. So when I spoke about my lip job, a lot of people called me brave for coming out.

Kids really don't care about what their friends look like.

Fashion for my mother was about asserting and demonstrating you had aesthetics, tastes, sensibility, manners, beauty - qualities that black people were always trying to prove they possessed, because it was often assumed that we didn't.

I would be criticized, like, 'You don't talk Korean enough. You sound very American. You sound very white in your music.' And I'm like, 'Whoa.'

America used to say that hip-hop was a cancer. Then it embraced that cancer and realized, 'Hey, this isn't a bad thing. It is part of us, just more America.'

That something that I fought so hard for throughout the beginning of my career is I didn't want to pancake my skin a lighter color to fit into the... ballet. I wanted to be myself. I didn't want to have to wear makeup that made my nose look thinner.

Everybody else was quoting 2Pac, and I was running around with Green Day in my Walkman. Racially speaking, I wasn't cool or appropriate for any group.

Music is an expression of who you are, and - at least in that sense - I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter. I'm a big black man, and I'm easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.

I think I gravitate towards rock 'n' roll as a playground where I can say anything.

Jazz is a word they use to sell our music, but to me that word does not exist.

Janis Joplin sings the blues as hard as any black person.

Being a blues singer is like being black two times.

It's time for people to see us, people of colour, for what we really are: complicated.

I don't think it's very difficult to bring a virginal, angst-ridden, hip-hop grunting white boy to the screen. Not that I have any experience with that. I don't know man. I understood where his head was at, because he was this 18-year-old cat that thought he was a man, but didn't really know what it meant to be a man.

Rock and roll doesn't allow you to grow up - especially if you're not trying very hard to.

I am more of a rock guy than I am a blues guy. People get the idea that I am a dyed in the wool blues cat, but I rock out when I do my show you know that.

I'm admitting that I don't know that to be true, but it does sound pretty good. So a big part of my childhood was affecting black culture and black accents and black music and anything black I was into.