Raw Music Quotes

The Beatles were raw musically, but I think they really had something.

I like my music with the rinds and the seeds and pulp left in.

When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Stuff like Buena Vista Social Club and Fela Kuti were quite a main thing to my childhood. As soon as I reached an age where I realized that Fela was singing in English, when I got past his accent, I loved the rawness of it, and the funk and the rhythm and the melody.

I'm still waiting for rock bands to come back, something raw and relevant.

I love polished pop music, but stuff like Neil Young's Crazy Horse vibe or Waylon Jennings, that stuff is raw and real.

I became Fantastic Negrito, and I felt like there was a rawness and an honesty in that music that I could relate to. That I was ready, finally, in my life to be that honest with myself.

If you think of the way Howlin' Wolf made records, you get the feeling there wasn't a production manager onsite, or a publicist having his say on how he should sing the songs. When you listen to his records, you feel like you're tapping into his voice.

It's just rock and roll. A lot of times we get criticized for it. A lot of music papers come out with: 'When are they going to stop playing these three chords?' If you believe you shouldn't play just three chords it's pretty silly on their part. To us, the simpler a song is, the better, 'cause it's more in line with what the person on the street is.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

The drums are very trashy: it's all electric, it's very in your face, and it's not perfect. It's raw, and I think that's what 'garage' means.

I wasn't into jazz so much - I preferred things raw.

We wanted it more live and raw. We didn't want a studio sound.

Hip-hop is the streets. Hip-hop is a couple of elements that it comes from back in the days... that feel of music with urgency that speaks to you. It speaks to your livelihood and it's not compromised. It's blunt. It's raw, straight off the street - from the beat to the voice to the words.

Just from the beginning, I really liked playing around with tape recorders. And then, when I got into punk rock, I only really liked - the rawer it was, the more I was into it.

If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing.

I just think that's more exciting. When people used to cut records live, there were mistakes all the time that stayed in. It was part of the charm. You're kind of missing something if everything is all doctored-up and clinical. So when we hear a mistake that sounds interesting, we make a point to keep it.

I got into Nirvana, and it was my sort of awakening into the idea that music could be like rough and crazy and local. And so I started to realize that there were bands playing in my town, Anacortes.

I love listening to demos. They're so raw.

R&B and all that stuff was always very spare and spontaneous. Nobody made those records under solid gold situations. It was just in and out, and you didn't labor over the thing. I like music like that.

I can see more naturalness in basic blues, basic R & B, basic rock 'n' roll.

The idea of 'raw' music, to me, is honesty: getting people to feel you with the least amount of production possible, the shortest distance traveled emotionally, sonically.

Music should be poor. Music should be with out air conditioning. That's just the way it is.

We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music.

I'm making music the way I would have done before modern equipment and music recording.