Genesis P-Orridge Quotes

The reflection of the world is blues, that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

In between 15 and 20 - probably at around 17 - my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didn't get to when I was younger.

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.

But of course it's different now, the blues is no longer blues, it's green now.

I dabbled in things like Howlin' Wolf, Cream and Led Zeppelin, but when I heard Son House and Robert Johnson, it blew my mind. It was something I'd been missing my whole life. That music made me discard everything else and just get down to the soul and honesty of the blues.

I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I did.

I think we as a band, as individuals, understand that all popular music stems from blues and jazz and even pop, but rock 'n' roll especially comes from blues. What we're trying to do is play rock 'n' roll, but other people call it different things.

What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.

There's no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I'm playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues - the blues we used to have when we had no money.

I hated country music growing up, but it gets in your bone marrow, kind of like a disease.

Fans want real songs, they want real experiences, and they want real instruments.

If you got in my truck, you were listening to country music, and that's the way it was for a long time. I'm a little more open to other sources of music now, a lot more. But for the formative years, I was just very into country.

I've gone through many phases in music in my life. Before I was signed, I was making completely different music, and my fan base has followed me. They continue to follow me as the music progresses and as I grow as an artist. As long as I stay true and don't pretend to be someone I'm not, I hope they'll come along with it.

Yes, our band will change and evolve, but we want to establish the reality of what this band truly sounds like.

I think people just have to realize that music grows, and hip-hop evolves. I mean, everything evolves.

I feel I've had three careers in one, really. There was the 'Benny Santini' stuff; that came with a general sense of, 'Who the hell is he?' And then there was 'The Road To Hell' stuff, and now there's the blues stuff.

There are people who will always want the genre, whatever it is, to stay traditional, to stay what it was like when you were 15 years old, but I just don't think music does that. Music is always changing and evolving, just like us as people.

Even though I was a rock 'n' roll fan, hearing the raw blues was like listening to music on a much deeper kind of level.

As we all know, the evil of slavery and the sting of the whip have given us many things including the voice of Nina Simone, the prose of James Baldwin, the Air Jordan sneaker, the blues, jazz, moonwalking, and more recently gangsta rap.

Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.

As a kid I was super into all kinds of pop. It wasn't until I became a teenager that I moved more into alternative music and punk rock.

I have a soft spot for 'Wind of Change' because it was my first one, and it was a departure from Humble Pie - very much so. It showed me the spectrum of what I could do.

Blues is the first step to get to jazz.

One of the things that always disappointed me as a kid, growing up, was when you could tell the singer had a fancy for something different and turned the band into something else.

Who am I to sit here and say I'm going to change the face of music?