Top 44 Popular Music Quotes

Popular music sucks so bad right now.

My knowledge of popular music more or less ends in 1972.

I try to create something that draws you in without overthinking it. Something that resonates with you automatically that you don’t have to think about. That’s what the best pop is about: Michael Jackson, The Beatles, Nirvana – these guys made some of the most authentic and popular music.

To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false.

Mumford and Sons and Adele are both incredible artists and are great for popular music. There’s a lot of club music with heavy beats, so to have that Mumford record and hear banjos being used is so cool.

I believe it’s possible to have hit songs and popular music that’s recorded by human beings.

Popularity gets up people‘s noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.

Entertainment isn’t just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it’s great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

I’ve only written 30 songs or something. Dylan‘s written over 500 songs. There’s no comparison. He’s the Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll and popular music.

We are living in a time when American popular music is finally being recognized as one of our most successful exports. The demand is huge.

Popular music has always been rooted in the blues, whether it’s Adele or Led Zeppelin or Sam Cooke. It’s just the beat that changes.

We still have to overcome the notion that a clarinet squeaks. People need to remember what a beautiful instrument it is, including in popular music.

In each medium – popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively – the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.

Folk music has been our popular music… There is a myth that youngsters only like heavy metal or rock music, but that’s not true.

Amplification of guitars revolutionized the popular music scene. Youngsters look for quick fame and big money with amplified guitars and working with rock groups.

In country music the lyric is important and the melodies get a little more complex all the time, and you hear marvelous new singers who are interested in writing and interpreting a lyric and in all form of popular music.

Popular music usually has a chorus that needs to repeat, and people need to remember the song. That’s sort of the major guideline when you’re writing a song.

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?

Very few opera singers in history have been able to cross into popular music.

His belief in the power of music to convey ideas – not just entertain – has filtered down to musicians in every field, from alt-rock to hip-hop, from Bruce Springsteen and U2 to Arcade Fire and Kanye West. Popular music is different because of Johnny Cash.

I don’t think I’m turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock and roll and popular music. It’s just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That’s why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I’m not doing imitations. That’s the way they sound inside me.

If you don’t know the blues… there’s no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

In my opinion, it seems like music is taking a bit of a turn. Look at Mumford and Sons, and the Lumineers. It seems like people and music fans are enjoying the more artistic side of music, and that popular music is taking a turn and accepting that, so I appreciate that.

Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind.

Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music – including jazz.

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 want to produce the best popular music I can.

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn’t exist.

Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music.

‘Next To Normal‘ is rock music. It’s a rock opera. That, definitely, has a place in popular music.

The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world‘s popular music is a good thing, for the most part.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock ‘n’ roll especially comes from blues.

The first half of ‘Book Reports‘ deals with the history of popular music and rock criticism. When I hooked all those historical pieces together, building on the minstrelsy piece, it became my history of popular music.

The country experience was more of a departure. When you consider my education and my upbringing, you can see that was more of country rock outgrowth of my popular music aspirations.

When you’re a young person, the solace one can get from popular music is something I just have tremendous nostalgia for, affection for. I still have it.

The love of Christ is not a pretend love. It is not a greeting-card love. It is not the kind of love that is praised in popular music and movies.

I grew up listening to popular music. My father was a Peruvian folk singer. He played the guitar at home. He sang songs with a waltzing rhythm, yet you can still hear the Spanish influences. I accompanied him to his performances.

Teen pop will never die as long as there are teens and popular music. It just takes a different head.

The great thing about the arts, and especially popular music, is that it really does cut across genres and races and classes.

My father was not really into popular music; I had to learn about that for myself.

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.

It’s a great thing that the United States has given the rest of the world – no other country has given such great popular music to the Far East and Europe. When I play those great countries, a lot of times, the audience starts singing the songs with me. They know them. They love them.

The basic function of popular music is to create an environment for courting, lovemaking, and doing the dishes. It’s useful because it addresses the heart in the midst of all these activities, and it will always be useful in this very important way.