Pop Music Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Alex Ebert

2. "Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent sublimations. It's all part of the conspiracy . . . all of it trying to convince them that they're here to be trained for lives of adventure and glamor and heroism, when in fact they're here only to be trained for more of the same, for lives of plunking in the quarters, paying a premium for the never-ending series of shabby fantasies to come, the whole lifelong laser light show of glamorous degradation and habitual novelty and fun-loving murder and global isolation."
Author: Alex Shakar

3. "Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'"
Author: Ani DiFranco

4. "Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?"
Author: Billy Joel

5. "I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."
Author: Bing Crosby

6. "If you try to do that in pop music - to play only rare show tunes, for example - people don't come."
Author: Bobby Short

7. "Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it."
Author: Bono

8. "Right now, all white people are either wearing or coveting a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. These sunglasses are so popular now that you cannot swing a canvas bag at a farmer's market without hitting a pair. In fact, at outdoor gatherings you should count the number of Wayfarers so you can determine exactly how white the event is. If you see no Wayfarers you are either at a country music concert or you are indoors."
Author: Christian Lander

9. "Pop music is a fashion, and fashions come and go. The public retires you as their tastes change."
Author: Cliff Martinez

10. "I have an unabashed adoration of cheesy pop music."
Author: Darren Criss

11. "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."
Author: Dave Haywood

12. "One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day."
Author: Dean Koontz

13. "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."
Author: Dinah Shore

14. "I'd like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population - about 25 million would be plenty - of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That's my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I'm still an optimist."
Author: Edward Abbey

15. "If you met my dad, I think a lot of things would be put to rest. Because my pops is a pretty silly guy. But, Coldcut, they're based in the U.K. I'm a big fan of jazz music, so American music has had a big influence on what I listen to."
Author: Eric San

16. "I come from a time when pop music was the coin of the cultural realm and in a certain way was the only coin of the realm; movies didn't matter as much, and not TV - it was all about pop music. In the era when I started - which was the early '60s - it was all about singles leading to albums."
Author: Fred Seibert

17. "Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;While the earth dreamed, and only I was wareOf that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.Nor any mournful music in her streams:Only I saw the shadow on her brows,Only I knew her for the yearly slain,And wept, and weep until she come again."
Author: Frederic Manning

18. "It was a cruel world though. More than half of all children died before they could reach maturity, thanks to chronic epidemics and malnutrition. People dropped like flies from polio and tuberculosis and smallpox and measles. There probably weren't many people who lived past forty. Women bore so many children, they became toothless old hags by the time they were in their thirties. People often had to resort to violence to survive. Tiny children were forced to do such heavy labor that their bones became deformed, and little girls were forced to become prostitutes on a daily basis. Little boys too, I suspect. Most people led minimal lives in worlds that had nothing to do with richness of perception or spirit. City streets were full of cripples and beggars and criminals. Only a small fraction of the population could gaze at the moon with deep feeling or enjoy a Shakespeare play or listen to the beautiful music of Dowland."
Author: Haruki Murakami

19. "In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music."
Author: James Fenton

20. "Final DispositionOthers divided closets full of mother's things.From the earth, I took her poppies.I wanted those fandango foldsof red and black chiffon she doted on,loving the wild and Moorish music of them,coating her tongue with the thin skinof their crimson petals.Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,she'd mock the clack of castanetsin answer to their gypsy cadence.She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it outas if to lift the ruffles, scarletalong the hemline of her yard.And so, I dug up, soil and all,the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumpsof leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stemsboth out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloomher blood's abandon, year after year,roots holding, their poppy heads noddinga carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep."
Author: Jane Glazer

21. "I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur."
Author: Jane Siberry

22. "Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable or am I miserable because listen to pop music?"
Author: John Cusack

23. "For me, I can only do that from my own experience with people I've known and things that I've lived and experienced. That's what good pop music is all about, pop music that does reach out to people. It's very personalized and very real, honest and sincere."
Author: Jon Secada

24. "I was a pop-music junkie. My parents were into Frank Sinatra and Doris Day. They weren't too excited when I had Aretha or the Stones pumping."
Author: Kara DioGuardi

25. "Commercial music, for the most part, is popular music and you always have to keep that in mind."
Author: Kenneth Edmonds

26. "Popular music sucks so bad right now."
Author: Kristin Hersh

27. "It's the latest popular song," declared the phonograph, speaking in a sulky tone of voice."A popular song?""Yes. One that the feeble-minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing. That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of all other songs."
Author: L. Frank Baum

28. "Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues."
Author: Lady Gaga

29. "If parents could just get their children moving around in the most simple and fun ways - jumping in leaves, dancing to pop music, throwing socks in a laundry basket - they could be sowing the seeds of great habits that could last a lifetime. It is all about turning it into a game."
Author: Magnus Scheving

30. "Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life."
Author: Martin Scorsese

31. "Pop music is created by repression - and then the system takes it and makes even more money with it!"
Author: Michel Gondry

32. "Do I want to be like him? Not really, I don't think. But I find myself worrying away at that stuff about pop music again, whether I like it because I'm unhappy, or whether I'm unhappy because I like."
Author: Nick Hornby

33. "My faith plays a big part in who I am: a Christian guy playing pop-rock music. I'm in a pop-rock band, not a Christian band."
Author: Nick Jonas

34. "I grew up singing since the age of three. Vocally trained since the age of eight. Fascinated by Mary Poppins and all those musical movies and really knew that I wanted to be a performer."
Author: Nikki Blonsky

35. "If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece."
Author: Peter Maxwell Davies

36. "The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality - accompanied by its commercialization in the corresponding subcultures. The threshold values for these two tendencies provide the intellectual landmarks for the twentieth century: the first tendency is represented by sport, which has become a metaphor for achievement as such, and the second by popular music, that devotio postmoderna which covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency."
Author: Peter Sloterdijk

37. "Pop music is aspirin and the blues are vitamins."
Author: Peter Tork

38. "Pop managers are fixed in the dramatic stock character repertoire too, ever since the first British pop film musical, Wolf Mankowitz's 'Expresso Bongo' of 1959, with Cliff Richard as Bongo Herbert and Laurence Harvey as his manager. The key components were cast as X parts gay, X parts Jewish and triple X opportunistic."
Author: Peter York

39. "Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today; it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down."
Author: Scott Weiland

40. "Disco is just pop music you can dance to."
Author: Sheena Easton

41. "I love pop music. Who doesn't?"
Author: Shirley Manson

42. "I have this massive love for the whole culture of pop music. It's my fascination, my ongoing passion."
Author: Siobhan Fahey

43. "Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music."
Author: Skitch Henderson

44. "I don't care if he hangs out with Skream/Benga or whoever," he spat, "it's just pure nonsense to ruin a hardcore genre with gay synths, chopped chipmunk vocals and cheesy poppy shit just so you can make a shitload of money and be an icon to a fanbase that consists of 13 year old wannabe dubheads and doesn't know shit about music."
Author: Skrillex

45. "Patrick actually used to be popular before Sam bought him some good music."
Author: Stephen Chbosky

46. "Pop music is so structured, and I'm excited to try and challenge that in my own work."
Author: Sufjan Stevens

47. "Something her father always used to say popped into her head. God hates a coward, Ruby. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and met his stare head-on. "Since you bought me an alcoholic beverage and I'm planning on kissing you, then yes. I'd say this qualifies as a date." His gaze dropped to her mouth, and she couldn't stop herself from biting her bottom lip. If the music wasn't so loud, she knew she would have heard him groan. "Sorry. I can't kiss you." Heat suffusing her face, Ruby pushed her chair back and stood. "No kissing, no fun, no gambling. I'm starting to forget why I found you interesting." Before she could blink, he moved to stand behind her. On either side of her, he laid his hands on the table, effectively blocking her escape. When he spoke, she felt his every word against her neck. "I just watched you bend over a pool table in those ridiculously tight jeans. Over. And over. You think I could stop at kissing?"
Author: Tessa Bailey

48. "Explicit material is available in a variety of forums - from popular music to television to the Internet."
Author: Tipper Gore

49. "I have come to terms with the fact that it's called pop music - that's what I play, and that is what I write. I think it is a pretty broad category."
Author: Tyler Hilton

50. "You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews."
Author: Warren Ellis

Pop Music Quotes Pictures