Kenny Beats Quotes

I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it.

As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box.

People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.

I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'

Musicians from the beginning of time have been there to express the mood and the musical feelings in the air for whatever's going on in that particular culture. It's the greatest joy as a musician to be able to translate that, be part of something and watch the scenery around you.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

I try to create songs that are really massive and intense, but at the same time remaining honest and raw.

Everything I've experienced, things that my friends have experienced and we talk about, things that are on the news - all aspects of life are in my message.

Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.

I don't just play the trumpet because it's something that resonates with me: I play the trumpet because I realize it's a means to help free a lot of people that ain't free.

I make my guitar scream with pain or pleasure or sensuality. It makes people move their feet and shake their bodies. That's what music does.

I don't believe that art is just for entertainment. I want to create art that is meaningful in some way.

The nature of music is mysterious and so much so that it generates strong emotions within us. It moves along passages that reach the most intimate areas of our psyche without being tried by prejudices or influences of any kind.

That it's a lot harder to make a keyboard sound not-cheesy than a guitar.

House music is about love, and lots of hip hop is about hate and intolerance, so in that respect, it's not good at all.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

I've learned how much of an impact that music has on people. I get messages all the time from people telling me what my music means to them and what it has done to them.

Ultimately, what we do as musicians, I think of us as a type of emotional engineer. We essential take these sound waves, this sound, and we organize it into emotion, and that's how we connect with our audiences.

Music commands how we feel, dictates what we experience in our feelings.

The blues is nothing but a story... The verses which are sung in the blues is a true story, what people are doing... what they all went through. It's not just a song, see?

I felt I had an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of great soul musicians of the past, who made a lot of social and political commentary through their music.

Each time I play a song it seems more real.

The best songs/films/collections expose truths about life and make them universally accessible; they progress humanity.

It's probably not an accident that the films that I care about happen to be about issues that matter to me, stories that I want to tell.