Pop Quotes - page 41
![Katy Perry: "I love M.I.A., but I don't think she likes me. I know how people who are anti-pop but are really pop feel about popstars" [August 2010, Rolling Stone]. (M.I.A.)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/63/m-i-a-august-1011263.webp)
«She is able to oscillate between classical allusions to the holy books and the works of great poets like Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Borges, Artaud and Celan, and then she comes to terms with the Beat Generation, with Ferlinghetti, Corso, with the philosophy of the existentialists. With immediate acceptances, repulses, with vast ignitions and immense fires, with echoes of jazz and pop music» (Dante Maffia about Fatti deprecabili/Deprecable Facts)
Caterina Davinio
If one strand in the heritage of the Sixties was high-cultural pretension, the other, its intimate inversion, was a hardening crust of knowing cynicism. The relative innocence of rock and roll was increasingly displaced by media-wise pop bands whose stock in trade was a derisive appropriation and degradation of the style forged by their immediate precursors. Much as popular romances and tabloid journalism had once fastened on to mass literacy for commercial advantage, so ‘punk' rock appeared in the Seventies in order to exploit the market for popular music. Presented as ‘counter-cultural' it was in fact parasitic upon mainstream culture, invoking violent images and radical language for frequently mercenary ends.
Tony Judt
There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today's most important musicians, sings his own 'Surf's Up.'
Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, 'Surf's Up' is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.
Brian Wilson
We are one, we are all brothers and sisters, but the people of the world do not know this. So this was the teaching, but how do you teach it? As young people, John Lennon, George Harrison, myself, Carlos Santana and other spiritual seekers in pop music, we wanted to know the answer but we found a question: How do you convince the rest of the western world that they are ill, they are mentally ill, that they have a sickness and that they have lost the way? How do you teach that? You cannot teach that in the normal sense. You have to encourage a spiritual call, so we devoted ourselves to making songs which would have a spiritual call inside of them, hoping to awaken an awareness with this music. And other people in the arts felt the same...
Donovan
[Coldplay is] a British pop group whose success derives from their ability to write melodramatic alt-rock songs about fake love. It does not matter that Coldplay is the shittiest fucking band I've ever heard in my entire fucking life, or that they sound like a mediocre photocopy of Travis (who sounds like a mediocre photocopy of Radiohead), or that their greatest fucking artistic achievement is a video where the blandly attractive frontman walks on a beach on a cloudy afternoon. None of that matters. What matters is that Coldplay manufactures fake love as frenetically as the Ford fucking Motor Company manufactures Mustangs. . . "For you I bleed myself dry," sang the blockhead vocalist, brilliantly informing us that stars in the sky are, in fact, yellow.
Chuck Klosterman
In terms of my singing I have sometimes been asked how it all began, and it's usually been a little hard for me to set the story down in any continuous narrative. From the days of my childhood I've been listening to sounds and singers, both colored and white, and absorbing a little bit here and a little bit there. Countless musicians of talent have helped. But it is Billie Holiday, whom I first heard in 52nd Street clubs in the early 1930s, who was and still remains the single greatest musical influence on me. It has been a warm and wonderful influence and I am very proud to acknowledge it. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years. With a few exceptions, every major pop singer in the U.S., during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius.
Frank Sinatra
[W]hen you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, then even space itself can pop into existence from nothing. Space and time can spontaneously pop into existence... Whole universes can pop into existence and most of them will disappear in a time scale so short you wouldn't know about it. The ones that can survive for a long time have zero total energy...
Lawrence M. Krauss
Start small, put down the book you're reading and sit with your grandmother to learn her language and find out about her life's struggles and her history, before she passes on and your history is lost; put down the TV remote control and stop letting pop culture define who you are and go for a walk through your hometown's historical landmarks. Find your identity by actually looking for the things in life that appeal to you or stir emotion in you. If you just let your government, your local imam, even your local pop singer or nasheed singer, define what you should be, you will never be more than that. Look in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Who do I WANT to be?' Start there.
Dawud Wharnsby
Where is the pop culture that makes riding public transportation and eating a plant-based diet fun, cool, and accessible to diverse audiences? Imagine the power of being exposed to an abundance of stories, songs, and images that challenge our fundamental consumption culture and expand our perspectives by helping us feel the consequences of our choices. What if we made it uncool to use fossil fuels in the same way smoking became uncool?
Favianna Rodriguez
Pop died, didn't cry, didn't know him that well / Between him doin' heroin and me doin' crack sales / With that in the eggshell, standin' at the tabernacle / Rather the church, pretendin' to be hurt - wouldn't work / So a smirk was all on my face / Like damn, that man's face is just like my face / So pop, I forgive you for all the shit that I lived through / It wasn't all your fault homey, you got caught.
Jay-Z
When Kate Bush came along, sort of '78, I was in The Slits, and I remember I was sitting in a van outside our singer's house, waiting to do a gig, and "Wuthering Heights" came on the radio, and I was like "Ooh, WHAT? What's this?" And I kept waiting for the melody to repeat, because, you know, at that time, pop music was very much Radio One, you know it was repeating melodies very quickly, and this melody it meandered on, and this high-pitched voice warbling and dropping, but I was absolutely spellbound.
Kate Bush
He was over all the time, all the time! He would stand outside and playfully throw rocks at the house. Roberto would always tease me. He liked to tell me that I couldn't cook. I couldn't cook. He and Curtis would sit there and eat half-cooked food, playing cards and drinking beer, pop, lemonade, whatever. Roberto loved to joke, he was really just a big kid. [...] Roberto and Curt were very close. Roberto would stay at the house all day long until it was time to go to the ballpark. Roberto and Curt would sit around and talk and joke in Spanish. Robert [sic] would look at me with that boyish smile ... he liked to make me think they were joking about me, or talking about some other girl. But he would always break down laughing, and tell me what he and Curtis had been saying. Roberto naturally gravitated to someone who could understand him. Even though we were all kids back then, I think Roberto looked at Curtis as something of a mentor.
Roberto Clemente
Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play - "Halt!"
C. S. Lewis
