Music Labeling Quotes

I resent the fact that a parental warning sticker has to be included on an album as cover art. To me that's censorship.

I'm from Atlanta, but I don't really consider myself an 'Atlanta rapper.'

I don't think a song should be put in a category.

I was considered as a jazz man rather than as a blues player. There were no blues players-you played one sort of jazz of another sort of jazz.

I think this whole division between the genres has more to do with marketing than anything else. It's terrible for the culture of music.

It's funny: when I was a kid, my mom would reorganize the record collection all the time. She'd have classical, she'd have Celtic, she'd have rock and roll, and then she'd have female singers. And I don't like it that female singers are their own genre.

I have come to terms with the fact that it's called pop music - that's what I play, and that is what I write. I think it is a pretty broad category.

None of my dudes I chill with are rappers. I don't put us as rappers. We're all artists.

My music is kind of laid back, it doesn't have super crispy, shiny production, and I'm not singing my heart out or whatever. But that whole idea of blogs declaring: "this is the new denomination for this sound" is ridiculous to me.

I've been called everything. Gangsta rap. I've been called conscious rap. You know, everything. Whoever feels like calling it whatever they want to call it, that's on them.

As a female, we always have to be labeled this new female rapper. It's never like, 'I heard this rapper Tink.' It's always, 'I heard a female rapper.'

I used to enjoy all the white bands when I was a kid listening to the radio. But the record companies, they take music and label it - like, they say "rock". Because the white singers can't sound like James Brown, they call him "soul". They've been doing that for years. That's the prejudice crap.

I think what people get confused about is that they want to label me as this EDM girl, but a lot of this stuff is genre-less.

I don't like being categorized as a rapper. I make music; I don't just rap.

We were bunched up with Southern bands, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. We just wanted to make it clear we weren't a Southern band.

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

People are asking us, 'Why have you gone country?' And we say, 'Man, we were born country.' They gave us the tag 'Southern rock' years ago as a way of not saying country.

I just try to make the best music that I can. People are going to label it whatever they're going to label it.

When we came out, they just labelled us 'ratchet music' cos we said 'ratchet' a lot. Ratchet means that's it's ghetto, but I would just call the music we're making just good music.

We are Korean, so obviously they call our music K-pop. But we never thought of our music as K-pop. Our music is just our music.

I don't really classify 'Wichita Lineman' as country.

A name doesn't make the music. It's just called that to differentiate it from other types of music.

My music has always been sort of in between categories. Sometimes record stores - back when there were record stores - they'd put my records in the country music section, but other record stores would put my records in the pop or even the rock section. As long as it's in the store somewhere, I'm OK with it.

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

I like all kinds of music. But I would rather people stop caring about lines.