Jack White Quotes

Maybe someday you can accuse somebody of being a poseur by selling out and playing blues music, but that's just not going to happen in my lifetime.

I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

The problem is the following, black music is increasing encumbered by white elements, often pleasant but always superfluous, easily and advantageously replaced with black elements.

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.

He's written some great songs. I thought that 'Blues Man' was a perfect song for me to do as a tribute.

The most important thing is that you honor that musical integrity, whether you make music that sounds like ABBA or you make music that sounds like Void.

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.

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.

What I do isn't black music; it's just my music.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.

My music isn't anything but me. It has jazz in it, and rock'n'roll, and it has an urgency to it.

I don't understand why people make me want to make music that's a join-the-dots thing by numbers. I find it really difficult when people say, 'Aw, you should have made a really big hip hop record, that would have been really good for you' or, 'You should have made a song like Lily Allen, that would have been so great.'

I didn't want to go out and change anything. I just wanted to make the music that was part of my background, which was rock and blues and hip-hop.

At first, I found the music I was making really hard to find a home for. I felt like my attitude was really British, but not the actual sounds I was making. Back in 2003, when I made 'Galang,' there were no clubs that had an 'anything and everything' attitude.

As far as I'm concerned, blues and jazz are the great American contributions to music.

Blues purists may hate what I do sometimes because it's a little dirtier.

I am consciously trying not to make it sound Celtic or African.

I have a very pop voice, but there's so much of me I associate mostly with urban music, so I try to blend the two.

When I did 'Frankenstein,' the record company said, 'Now you can do 'Dracula' and 'Wolf Man' and we'll call the whole thing Monster Rock!' and I said, 'No, that's not going to happen, I'm not going to do that.' I kind of enjoy defying categorization. I love music in and of itself. I love the beauty of harmony and rhythm.

When I did 'Unforgettable,' it wasn't appropriate for us to take liberties with that music. There had to be kind of a fine line between what had made it so great and the fact that a woman was singing it. We changed some of the arrangements, but not too much.

We worked very hard to make the lyrics suit the music. I can't, like Elton John, for example, compose by lyrics. Elton has a great talent for that. Whatever you give him, including your questions, he composes in half an hour and makes a great song out of it.

One of my problems is I'm not really sure if I slot into rock or not. I've always tried to combine world music, folk, jazz, blues and rock, and have done since Traffic.

We get accused of inauthenticity because we play the instruments we play.