Kygo Quotes

Music is music; you don't have to put a label on it.

What I do isn't black music; it's just my music.

People grapple with labeling me as hip-hop, R&B, or pop, and it's interesting to me. I'm just making music.

A lot of people who have been perceiving my music have been trying to formulate a genre for it, and I think it's just a natural thing; it doesn't need to be categorized. It doesn't need to be sectioned, if you will.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

Music is music. It doesn't matter if I am trying to aim at country or trying to aim at pop.

Any genre as it's called, I think can be quite reductive in terms of what a film is, because I think there is an eagerness to put in any film, in anybody's work, to give it a genre title and I think as a consequence of that, the film starts to obey the rules of the genre.

I never looked or really believed that music should be categorized into particular genres.

I've been criticized for doing so - crossover music. But I never claimed to be a pure dancehall artist.

I hate the pigeonholing that's happened in the music business in the last 30 years.

I didn't get into music to become a blues musician, or a country musician. I'm a singer-songwriter. In my book that means I get to do whatever I want.

I'm not too bothered about what category my music goes in and there's no point in limiting in who you can reach, but I want it to be respected.

I don't like the word 'urban' because I think it's a bit of a generalisation and they use it to class music, but I don't think it's a word that necessarily classes music.

I never excluded any genre on my first record.

What I'm trying to do is break the genre from what is rap and what is music.

To break R&B into subcategories does a disservice to the music. I like to live in a zone where I can do whatever I want, where I don't have to worry about genre.

I've always tried to stay clear of being labeled, putting a label on what type of music that I make.

Listen, man: I am not the industrial godfather, king, whatever. I don't relish that title. I don't like it. I think it's limiting. I do country, I do blues. I don't just go straight.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me. You know, I grew up listening to punk.

I really love music that's on the periphery of not fitting into a clear genre. I felt like I was constantly being described as something I didn't really feel like I identified with.

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.

I hate labels; the problem is that if you say you're one thing, it's hard for people to imagine you as something else. Music is way more complicated than that.

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?