I love love songs, but sometimes it's okay to just be young and talk about something other than getting married or falling in love. There are so many fun things that you live that you can write about and people of all ages can connect to.
There's a lot of good rappers in England at the moment. There's a lot of good dance acts. A lot of good, young guitar acts. I think a lot of groups came from that dole culture of the late 80's/early 90's - it's not as easy now. I think there's a dearth of working class bands.
I feel dance and pop music genres are extremely female and extremely gay. When it comes to art and pop culture, queers are f - king weirdos. We don't have gender rules that tell us what we can and can't be. We just make it up as we go along. We have full creative license to be whatever we want to be.
Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras. They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?
Today, there's so many different types of music out there that it's difficult to keep up. Things do change; it's only natural.
"Music, for me, has always been a place where anything is possible--a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together, and anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations.
While silly ni**as argue over who gon' snatch the crown / Look around my ni**a, white people have snatched the sound / This year I'll probably go to the awards dappered down / Watch Iggy win a Grammy as I try to crack a smile.
It's hard being a white rapper sometimes! When that happens you just need to battle through.
I'm not a big hip-hop fan, but I respect all kinds of music and some of them are really cool.
The industry has always been accepting of gay artists, but a particular thing for me is to see gay artists of color.
We used to play a lot of Fela Kuti in the early days of hip-hop. In my DJ sets I'll jump off into rock, salsa, African. I like to play some crazy stuff and see the vibrations of the people.
Hip-hop in a lot of ways is like sports; when you go to a sports game, you see people from all ages, all ethnicities, all social classes, they're all there enjoying the game. Hip-hop has been one of the only forms of music that has provided that kind of atmosphere.
A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.
As long as there is democracy, there will be people wanting to play jazz because nothing else will ever so perfectly capture the democratic process in sound. Jazz means working things out musically with other people. You have to listen to other musicians and play with them even if you don't agree with what they're playing. It teaches you the very opposite of racism and anti-Semitism. It teaches you that the world is big enough to accommodate us all.
I strongly encourage listening to the radio to hear something you haven't heard before. It's a very healthy thing to do. It's strange: unless you reload your iPods every couple of weeks, you're listening to and recycling the same music all of the time. I'm serious. Listen to your radio station.
There were so many more opportunities in K-pop for a young Asian American singer.
It’s very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party.
You have to have a balance, and I think that people get upset about Hip-Hop and say that it's dead because there is no balance. It's just all this simple-minded music, and it doesn't seem to be any content, and the dance club music outnumbers the little content there is.
I am glad so many women singers are being heard in music today. It is healthy for music . . . healthy because it means a lot of men are listening!
I wasn't allowed to play in some universities in the United States and out of twenty-five concerts, twenty-three were canceled unless I would substitute my black bass player for my old white bass player, which I wouldn't do.
I got an email from my dad after the Super Bowl, and he was like, "Will you send me all of the Beyoncé Knowles songs that you have on your computer?" I'm like, "You never listen to Beyoncé. I'm so excited right now." It's good to embrace new things. I like when I can show people that it's not all one genre, and everything is very much inspired by everything else.
Of course it's fantastic to have bands formed in garages, but there is a market for other types of music.
Rap music and rap records used to always be like this: we get one or two shots to a piece cause it was a singles marketplace and when the major record companies saw that it could also handle the sales of the albums then they started to force everybody to expand their topics from 1 to about 10 and you gotta deliver 12 songs, so a lot of times if you took a person who wasn't really developed, and the diversity of trying say 12 different things, you know the companies were like "Cool! Say the same thing 12 different ways."
It was unlikely that anyone had ever heard a black person sing country music.
I'm not saying that what the radio plays isn't good. My issue is with what they don't play. You can play Jay-Z, but why don't you play Jurassic 5? You can play Nas and Nelly, but why don't you play J-Live? I want to open up the door to how it was back in the day.
