Music as a Tool for Change Quotes

People underestimate the hip-hop audience and the capacity to understand politics when it's part of music.

The music comes through me, and I let it come the way it comes, and it shapes itself. I just hold space for it. I don't intend to write it for a purpose, but it comes as it comes and am proud of the way it can support change because I believe strongly in what I sing about.

I'm not a goddess, for crying out loud. I'm a regular person who took feminism - which I have a deep connection to - and mixed it with music, which I really love to do.

My experience is that white kids love hip-hop, and brown and black kids love rock music. That shows that brown kids - they carry emotion, they carry pain, they carry oppression and strife.

In Latin America, people want you to write beautiful melodies and words. But there are also songs that do well because they show the reality of life.

I continue to write songs that are topically related to social, political and economic issues of our time, but I also recognize that onstage, I have a lot of fun and audiences have a lot of fun, so I'm trying to package the messages in music and sounds that are fun to perform and fun to listen to.

I always felt that rap didn't cause crime; it just reflected it.

Musicians want to be the loud voice for so many quiet hearts.

Thinking about the artists I've loved through the years, my favorites are the ones who've made music with cultural, societal and political significance.

If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.

I think that generally music should be a positive thing, I like Bob Marley's attitude: he said that his goal in life was to single handedly fight all the evil in the world with nothing but music, and when he went to a place he didn't go to play, he went to conquer.

Pop music has been the center of change, you know? And positive messages. I would love to get back to that place because I think we've lost it a little bit.

'Jack & Diane' was originally about race. I was playing nightclubs, and I was seeing new American couples, mixed-race couples. I thought it was cool. The song was my effort to make a song about that, but of course the record-company guy didn't like it.

An American Idol is someone who knows how to change people's lives through music.

But can a song stop a war? If Bob Marley and Bob Dylan couldn't do it, it can't be done.

I think that there are artists of different genres whose calling is to use their art to hope to affect and better the human condition - whether it's System of a Down, or Rage Against the Machine, or Public Enemy, or the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, or Pete Seeger. It's a group that I'm proud to be counted among.

I'm glad if people can listen to some music and maybe fix some prejudices of their own, just by thinking.

You're living in a fantasy to think that music can actually change something.

Politics and music should only mix to a point. Me, I think my job as a musician is to make people try to forget about all that.

It's hard for me to see myself as meaningful, but people seem to like my music, so who knows. Maybe my music is empowering some more young women to pick up songwriting/playing.

In America, there's more of the question, should music be political or should it just be for entertainment purposes, whereas around the world that's not even an issue. I think people just assume that music should be everything.

Music is an extremely powerful force if used properly to uplift people. I believe music should be uplifting and not downgrading... it's a very, very powerful tool.

That taught me one lesson which is that you're naive to believe that bands can change the world. Bands are very naive to think that just if their audience thinks that they can change the world, that they can. That was quite a lesson for my career, really.

When you're trying to bring the streets into rap to prove a point, then you already lost. You separate the two, and that ain't to be played with. You've got people that lost their lives and people that are doing real time. If we gon' make music, let's just make music.