David Byrne Quotes

You can't kill Rock 'n' Roll. It's here to stay

I don't know what you wanna describe as Rock 'n' Roll, but I certainly thought that 60s stuff, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, changed the world a little bit. But the effect seems to have retreated. I think it's harder than we think to change the world. These things go in cycles. It doesn't seem to have done an awful lot of good, does it? You know, all the talk of racial harmony and equality in the world... we haven't got a long way since the 60s.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.

Rock has always been the devil's music... I believe that rock & roll is dangerous... I feel that we're only heralding something even darker than ourselves.

Rock 'n roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics ... manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.

Hip-hop is rock & roll. What the hell is Wu-Tang but Motorhead?

Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

I wouldn't say rock & roll is dead but the current music made by young people isn't really rock & roll.

There is nothing conceptually better than rock 'n' roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on Whole Lot of Shaking for my money. Or maybe I'm like our parents: that's my period and I dig it and I'll never leave it.

No matter what happens in the future, rock and roll will save the world.

Rock 'n' roll is meant to entertain. Hippie folk singers are supposed to be singing about leftist views, but I don't think rock 'n' roll was ever that way. I don't remember the early rock 'n' rollers ever expressing any political views.

My my, hey hey... Rock and roll is here to stay. Hey hey, my my... Rock and roll will never die.

Now that rock is turning 50, it's become classical in itself. It's interesting to see that development.

Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world.

They'll see it. And it doesn't matter if they don't. It's only Rock 'n' Roll. But I do intend to move more into the Mainstream. Marilyn Manson is just the First phase.

Rock n' roll means so much more to people; it enriches the culture. Also, it inspires people; there's no half-feeling. When I first got into it, I was inspired by people who had come before me, and I found myself in the position of handing that on.

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

No, I don't think rock 'n' roll will ever fade.

If you actually go back and listen to my first album, there are some things on there that are kind of rock 'n' roll.

In pop music, you say, 'You can do what you want to me.' Rock 'n' roll says, 'I'm gonna do what I want to you.'

The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.

It's rooted in things that maybe older people or people my age remember as being rock music. But at the same time, I don't think we're stuck in the past or retro. I think we've tried to push ourselves and experiment with what we can call Wilco music.

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

The genius of rock music is that it matched the cultural hysteria around it.

I'm into rock'n'roll because rock'n'roll, to me, means freedom.