Best 14 quotes in «popular music quotes» category

...indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.

Prison. Confinement. Incarceration. Up to three years of nothing but four walls for a victimless crime that maybe he didn't commit. That was the prospect facing - contradicting - Jim Morrison, main lyricist and lead singer of the Doors. Who could imagine that the man who lived so free could be reduced to a number in Florida's penal system?

reality has too many heads

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.

When you're on stage, the audience becomes your other half. It's the ultimate high you can reach as a musician - an incredible feeling. No matter where I am it's still the same; there's a reason we call music the universal language.

It was such an amazing time for music in the Sixties. When popular music hit me, it was like magic was in the air.

I turn on the radio now and I don't have anything against a lot of sequenced and programmed and electronic music, a lot of it is dope and it's the future. It's what popular music has evolved to.

Popular music formed the soundtrack of my life.

The history of popular music is littered with great partnerships. Rodgers had his Hammerstein, Lennon had his McCartney, and Lloyd Webber had... his photocopier.

As fandom scholars who are also music lovers, we have focused on the noon heat of passion, not the ways in which fandom can wax and wane. Even the precise reasons why any particular individual's fandom might end have rarely been examined and are poorly understood. Fandom always just seems there. Our relative blindness to its beginnings, endings and history is endemic to the field.

Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.

Epic, adult and widescreen in its ambitions, the beefed-up Comeback version of 'Let Yourself Go' sounded almost violent in its execution, with Elvis's raw and desperate vocals every match for the gargantuan, aggressive horns and percussion that dominated the mix. A big, sweaty, dusty monster of a take towered over the Culver City version, and perfectly captured the tumultuous social and political strife of its era in dissonant musical form. This new version of 'Let Yourself Go' was unfailingly magnificent in its vision.

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.

Because I don't make the mistake that high-culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too,” the late filmmaker Dennis Potter once said, explaining why pop songs were so important in his work, from Pennies from Heaven to The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar, his paean to the 1950s, the time he shared with the Independent Group—and Potter was also defining a pop ethos, defining what I think is happening in Paolizzi's collage. "When people say, 'Oh listen, they're playing our song,' they don't mean 'Our song, this little cheap, tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish, is what we felt when we met.' What they're saying is, 'That song reminds us of that tremendous feeling we had when we met.' Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David's Psalms. They're saying, 'Listen, the world isn't quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,' 'There's you and me in it,' or 'The sun is shining in it.' So-called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. Anyone who says different is a fascist.