Popular Music Quotes

I'm mainstream, and I have pretty chart-tastic tastes. I don't often veer away from a big melodic song with big words for big stadiums.

If you listen to the radio for a whole hour there's maybe one decent song. The rest is mass-produced garbage

The great countercultural movement that we all know from the mid-1960s was epitomised by popular music. But within a few years another shift happened: the birth of alternative theatre.

The bands I like are not obscure at all. Far from it.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

The average commercial radio listener in America is not looking for lofty, intellectual subjects. This isn't brain surgery. It's about striking the passion of the people.

I don't think all music that is considered 'avant-garde' is bad, but it's definitely elitist. I hope my music is not that.

It really does help everyone when there are some big bands leading the charge.

At the end of the day, the Grammys are about recognizing genres that are making an impact.

When 'I'm Sorry' came out and became such a huge hit, that made 'Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree' start selling. Then that became a huge, huge hit.

No band has two hours' worth of greatest hits, but Queen comes close.

I remember hearing people like Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac, and Elvis. My parents were big fans of them, and they were the early seeds. My brother was more into Slipknot, and I still listen to them, too, but it wasn't until I listened to Paolo Nutini that it really clicked.

The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too.

It's not the coolest thing in the world to be walking around humming the Taylor Swift song. It's not as cool to be singing along with the number one song in the country as it is to be the jaded, indifferent hipster who wants to turn you on to something that nobody else is talking about.

One of the disadvantages of poetry over popular music is that if you write a pop song, it naturally gets into people's heads as they listen in the car. You don't have to memorize a Paul Simon song; it's just in your head, and you can sing along. With a poem, you have to will yourself to memorize it.

I didn't want to record 'I Think We're Alone Now,' because I thought it wouldn't show that I could actually sing.

I just don't get that new hot music. I don't know anything about all these groups like U2.

You don't really write a hit song - you write a great song, and then, if the public decides it's a hit, they take over from there. The song becomes its own monster.

I listen to top 40, old country, blues... I'm really into Roger Miller.

I love all types of music. I love top 40 dance pop, hip-hop, I don't even know what they call it now. I'm a huge fan of all that.

I think Theodore Adorno was profoundly ignorant. I think even Adorno's fans think he was bad at understanding popular music. He thought it was all jazz.

My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio.

We want to be considered a band, like Maroon 5 or Coldplay.

Before Elvis there was nothing.

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three.