Popular Music Quotes

“Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“...indeed it is very true that, just as the finest air in the world is vulgarized beyond all bearing once the public has taken to hum it and the street organs to play it, so the work of art that has appealed to the sham connoisseurs, that is admired by the uncritical, that is not content to rouse the enthusiasm of only a chosen few, becomes for this very reason, in the eyes of the elect, a thing polluted, commonplace, almost repulsive.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain

“reality has too many heads”
― Bob Dylan, Lyrics, 1962-2001

“Because I don't make the mistake that high-culture mongers do of assuming that because people like cheap art, their feelings are cheap, too,” the late filmmaker Dennis Potter once said, explaining why pop songs were so important in his work, from Pennies from Heaven to The Singing Detective to Lipstick on Your Collar, his paean to the 1950s, the time he shared with the Independent Group—and Potter was also defining a pop ethos, defining what I think is happening in Paolizzi's collage.
"When people say, 'Oh listen, they're playing our song,' they don't mean 'Our song, this little cheap, tinkling, syncopated piece of rubbish, is what we felt when we met.' What they're saying is, 'That song reminds us of that tremendous feeling we had when we met.' Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of descent from David's Psalms. They're saying, 'Listen, the world isn't quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,' 'There's you and me in it,' or 'The sun is shining in it.' So-called dumb people, simple people, uneducated people, have as authentic and profound depth of feeling as the most educated on earth. Anyone who says different is a fascist.”
― Greil Marcus, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

“She's gone, she's gone.'" Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who'd been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits.”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“Despite all the talk of diversity and division--of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight--Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs?”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“The de-spiritualization of asceticisms is probably the event in the current intellectual history of mankind that is the most comprehensive and, because of its large scale, the hardest to perceive, yet at once the most palpable and atmospherically powerful. Its counterpart is the informalization of spirituality - accompanied by its commercialization in the corresponding subcultures. The threshold values for these two tendencies provide the intellectual landmarks for the twentieth century: the first tendency is represented by sport, which has become a metaphor for achievement as such, and the second by popular music, that devotio postmoderna which covers the lives of contemporary individuals with unpredictable flashes of inner emergency.”
― Peter Sloterdijk, Du mußt dein Leben ändern

“Prison. Confinement. Incarceration. Up to three years of nothing but four walls for a victimless crime that maybe he didn't commit. That was the prospect facing - contradicting - Jim Morrison, main lyricist and lead singer of the Doors. Who could imagine that the man who lived so free could be reduced to a number in Florida's penal system?”
― Daveth Milton, We Want The World: Jim Morrison, The Living Theatre and the FBI

“Epic, adult and widescreen in its ambitions, the beefed-up Comeback version of 'Let Yourself Go' sounded almost violent in its execution, with Elvis's raw and desperate vocals every match for the gargantuan, aggressive horns and percussion that dominated the mix. A big, sweaty, dusty monster of a take towered over the Culver City version, and perfectly captured the tumultuous social and political strife of its era in dissonant musical form. This new version of 'Let Yourself Go' was unfailingly magnificent in its vision.”
― Mark Duffett, Counting Down Elvis: His 100 Finest Songs

“As fandom scholars who are also music lovers, we have focused on the noon heat of passion, not the ways in which fandom can wax and wane. Even the precise reasons why any particular individual's fandom might end have rarely been examined and are poorly understood. Fandom always just seems there. Our relative blindness to its beginnings, endings and history is endemic to the field.”
― Mark Duffett, Fan Identities and Practices in Context: Dedicated to Music

“When you're on stage, the audience becomes your other half. It's the ultimate high you can reach as a musician - an incredible feeling. No matter where I am it's still the same; there's a reason we call music the universal language.”
― Laura Branigan

“Like everyone else, Prokofiev assumed that Gershwin wrote songs only for dollars and had to drop his real work to do them. Yet the chances are for at least some of the morning, he'd been listening to George's songs and enjoying them just as much as the "serious" parts. But if he'd known the songs better, he might have realized, as Duke did, that Gershwin just wrote Gershwin, and the dollars he made only helped him to write more Gershwin.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Hear that lonesome whistle blowing/'cross the trestle' John Mercer would write to Arlen's music, and suddenly Tin Pan Alley seemed to contain railway yards and bus depots that hadn't been there before. 'It's a quarter to three/there's no one in the place except you and me,' writes Mercer also, and Arlen's music conveys all the solitude of a roadhouse in the outback, as far from Johnny's Savannah' social register as it is from the Arluck parlor. Both Mercer and Arlen saw this other America as clearly as the half-British Raymond Chandler saw Los Angeles, with the freshness and sharpness of outsiders, and their songs constitute priceless social documents.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Hoagy Carmichael was, like many Americans, a divided soul, part nomad and part homebody, who seemed a little bit at home everywhere, but was probably more so someplace else, if he could just find it.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Jazz was not in its heart a singing medium, and if the public insisted on words anyway, Louis Armstrong's response was instinctively right--to sing nonsense, sing scat. Use the human voice purely as an instrument, and make clear that that's what you're doing. Jazz tells its own stories. It doesn't need words, and scat is simply jazz's way of saying, 'Get lost.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Unlike Roberta, which is Kern's creation all the way, Swing Time is Astaire's turf. Fred had uniquely mastered the art of swinging tastefully, without entirely tipping into the down and dirty. He could be hot and cool at the same time. So if Kern was ever going to get hot himself, clearly this was the man to do it with.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Harry Warren was ready for the pressure, and ready to go from two hit songs a year tops to sometimes two or more hits a movie, starting with this most crucial one. The title song itself has an epic quality to it, as if to say 'I now declare this era open.' The movie 42nd Street gives you not just New York, even better to my mind than '/Lullaby of Broadway' does, but almost the exact year in New York, something Harry had never come close to while he was still living there.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“But Beautiful' is such a moving tribute to love that it verges on a hymn, yet Van Heusen's own love life was anything but holy. His little black book was said to be the envy of Hollywood, which is like being praised for your cooking in Paris.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Where a Gershwin song had once said 'Made in New York--Place in a crowded theater immediately,' a Van Heusen song said "Made in the U.S.A.--Sounds best in a lonely bar or an empty apartment where the owner is experiencing sleeping problems due to heartbreak.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“Four days in a row, up at four. a.m. to test fly new Lockheed warplanes until noon, under the name of Chester Babcock; then off to Paramount to write songs for the rest of the day as his other self, Jimmy Van Heusen; the, a two-and-a-half-day break, during which he only had to get up whenever the studio did, to write songs all day this time. Then back to Go, and you can sleep as long as you like when the war is over, buddy.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty

“At some unknown early date, he [Mercer] took to crossing over regularly to the black side of town, where he immersed himself so deeply in jazz and blues that he would one day receive a citation from a black social group calling him 'our favorite colored singer.' As Hoagy Carmichael, his partner in jazz, would say, 'Johnny knew.' For all his adaptability, there was a black-jazz base in everything Mercer wrote.”
― Wilfrid Sheed, The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty