People forget how dominant Public Enemy became in the mid '80s. No one talks about how transformative they were. And then that led to the '90s and the sort of East Coast v. West Coast stuff, which is kinda when I came of age.
I'm not one of those pop guys. That's for wimps like Vanilla Ice.
In the sixties when Paul was with the Beatles and I was with the Moody Blues, we shared the same bill and tried to blow each other off the stage.
The Beach Boys already had about four or five albums under our belt when these newcomers, The Beatles, took the U.S. by storm in early 1964.
People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.
I was a Beach Boys guy, but I was won over. In '64, as the radio stations were creating this duel between The Beatles and The Beach Boys, I slowly but surely got won over by the Mop Tops.
But if you want me to knock Kingdom Come, all I will say is that I heard the guitarist said he'd never heard my playing, and I'd defy any guitarist in American not to have heard Led Zeppelin.
The Stones were more dangerous than other bands of the Sixties. It looked like they had more fun than the Beatles - like they stayed up later.
I didn't hate Nirvana. That was more of a media-constructed this-versus-that thing.
The only thing that's really riled me up in the last ten years has been the White Stripes. That's the one band that's gotten me competitive, and that's good.
In 1997, we took time off, and that's when Oasis broke and Princess Diana died and I was home with my baby hating the music industry. People asked what I thought about the Spice Girls, and honestly, I was so happy to tell them I couldn't be bothered to care.
The Eagles and the Captain and Tennille ruled the airwaves, and we were the answer to it.
I don't think you'd say we'd be rivals because we've got a completely different line-up to The Beatles.
Jimi Hendrix isn't as good as me!
Plus I am being hounded by all the fabulous new drummers, Bill Stewart at the head of the pack.
I like J. Cole when he's not taking shots at me.
Backstreet Boys fans don't want to hear the New Kids singing all of their hits. Just like our fans don't want to hear the Backstreet Boys singing all of our hits.
Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!
The best bounce rapper ain't gonna be able to compete with Jay-Z, not on a major scale.
I would be more familiar with Janet Jackson than I was with the Teardrop Explodes or Joy Division, because I didn't want to listen to my competitors for fear of nicking ideas off them.
Pop and metal aren't friends. Each knows exactly where the other lives and tries to keep its distance. They choose different streets, neighborhoods, zip codes.
When I fell in love with hip-hop, there was a terminology at the time called "battling." All that was just battling with other artists, but after Tupac and those incidents when it spilled into the street and turned into a negative situation, battling turned into a beef. A whole new dynamic.
You'll never find a Manchester band slagging off another Manchester band, but within each Manchester band, people will rip each other apart: Mondays, Smiths, New Order, Roses, Oasis.
I never really liked the idea of rap being a competitive thing. It's not.
