Stanley Crouch Quotes

I like to sort through music and see whatever pops out to me or inspires me. If I could have a production team going and kind of mix records with me, that would be cool; to take the records and have them sound the way I want them to sound. But I'd rather sort though music to find them things.

I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.

I write the songs and hand it over to the world and see what happens. But the things that I've written for people that have been hits, I don't know that I would have directed them in the right path, but they definitely wound up on the right path.

I just try to approach and serve the music in the way that I think is right for the band I'm in at the time.

The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made.

It's funny: as a director, there are movies you make because you're passionate about getting your vision across, and you know that you're vision is different than anybody else. In those cases, you take the plunge, and it works, or it doesn't. You make the stylistic choices based on how you feel about the material.

I feel a composer should not crave to sing songs because songs itself decides its voice. The films where I have given music, I have kept my option for the last. I like to make music and not necessarily singing all the songs.

There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.

The orchestra confides in me about their music director or their conductor, and I've never seen a conductor that's been liked by everyone.

The tough thing about radio is I've met a lot of people in it who like my music. But it's hard for them to figure out how to play what they like when there's somebody up above them yelling 'you have to play this.'

Robert Gober, for example. He doesn't seem like somebody who is just going to show in a gallery that asks him to show. He's just making his work, and when he's ready, he's going to show it.

It's what I always dreamed of: that you can make TV and everyone would get out of your way and you follow your vision without watering it down.

Any time you turn off and let someone else make any artistic decision for you, you make a mistake.

I want to be able to do what I want to do. A lot of times, the major labels, they can't see the vision, they can only see the dollar signs. So, it doesn't really work out like that.

You're the artist - you make the music that you want to make.

Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion.

We sort of quickly realized every rhythm, Opetaia [Foa'i] takes the lead.

All musicians are potential band leaders.

Don't make a film if it can't be the film you want to make. It's a joke, and a sick joke, and it'll kill you.

The authenticity aspect is pretty important to me. When we have to compromise and do something that's not authentic, it really rubs me, every time I have to see it in the edit, which is millions of times.

I direct, and I make movies I can't finance. I can't raise money. I can't sell anything. I make things.

I say, play your own way. Don't play what the public want - you play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doing - even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years.

I was the front man of the choir and then when I was 12 and I was the leadsinger of my highschool groups.

That business aspect of the media, that Charlotte Street world, the advertising and programme executives, it leaves me absolutely cold. I'm supposed to be the director of a television company, but I've only ever seen that company as a vehicle for making the kind of programmes we wanted to make, getting our ideas on the screen.