Mainstream Music Quotes & Sayings

I guess in general, because it's such a popular trend in mainstream American pop, that there's been some kind of negative reaction to it. But at the same time, it's a really interesting effect and really interesting texture, and a lot of credit goes to Rostam for producing our music, and all the work that he puts into it, and just trying different things. Ezra did a vocal take, Rostam threw auto-tune on it, and we all liked the way it sounded. — Chris Baio

Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it — Thurston Moore

I don't care what's happening in the mainstream of country music. I haven't in a long time. — Steve Earle

My friends are mostly familiar with music that plays on the mainstream radio. — Jessica Sanchez

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas. — Kevin Ayers

Culture is the heritage of us all. some may be more interested than others in the treasures of the past, but no one can fail to take a pride in his country's participation in the story of mankind, as represented in carvings, sculpture, music, paintings and the other arts. And there is a personal commitment to this, for no man can really say he is alone: we are all joined through our identity, with the cultures which are part of the mainstream of life — Simon Kapwepwe

Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music. — Thurston Moore

I'm very fussy about how my records sound, but I'm very aware that because of the way they sound, I will never be a big-selling, mainstream artist because the public has gotten conditioned to hearing pop music in a certain way. And I don't do it that way. — Nick Lowe

Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here. — Michelle Shocked

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests. — Thom Yorke

I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it. — Steve Albini

I think maybe since there isn't a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don't understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out. — Thom Yorke

All of my favorite records have vocals high in the mix, even if it's music that wasn't necessarily mainstream. — Dee Dee Ramone

Here's how to get started with the antipolitical politics of the Benedict Option. Secede culturally from the mainstream. Turn off the television. Put the smartphones away. Read books. Play games. Make music. Feast with your neighbors. It is not enough to avoid what is bad; you must also embrace what is good. Start a church, or a group within your church. Open a classical Christian school, or join and strengthen one that exists. Plant a garden, and participate in a local farmer's market. Teach kids how to play music, and start a band. Join the volunteer fire department. — Rod Dreher

Celtic music will always be around, even if with the mainstream crowds it dies out. — Natalie MacMaster

Fine-art photography is a very small world associated with galleries, museums, and university art programs. It's not like rock music; the products of this world have never been widely seen because the artists are often exploring things that are not already coded in general consciousness. It's not that photographers don't want to be famous, it's just that very few of the views from the edges of culture make the mainstream. Ansel Adams was an exception. — Mark Klett

Pitbull is great with brands. Endorsements with hip-hop artists work because hip-hop artists typically set the most trends ... It's every brand's goal to be seen in the mainstream, and hip-hop music has become mainstream music. — Adam Kluger

Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's. — Nina Blackwood

Basically the subcultures formed in the U.K. because the mainstream was not satisfying the needs of certain people like myself. So through music and through style, we found our tribe, we found like-minded rebels. — Don Letts

When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music. — Dan Hill

Electronic music is really weird right, because it is bleeding into the mainstream, but, at the same time, it's fashion. — Nigel Godrich

I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just — Billy Corgan

Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now. — Bob Dylan

Dance music has pushed its way into the mainstream. Which is good for me. — Jessie Ware

Surf music at the time that I did it wasn't mainstream, nor were the Cheech and Chong albums. The risk comes from having the ability to do something that hadn't been done before that I thought was either interesting as an art form or just should be done. — Lou Adler

The only two shows I watch are 'Walking Dead' and 'Nashville,' but both just went off the air for a couple of months, so I feel like I have to be productive because I'm not sitting around waiting for the next episode of zombies or mainstream country music. — Caitlin Rose

There's not a lot of pop music in the mainstream that makes you feel scared, that makes you wonder what's happening. — Prince

Images of strangled women, women in cages do not push any limits; they are a mainstream cliche of a mainstream social order. Rock music fails to live up to its subversive tradition when it eroticizes the same old establishment sadomasochism rather than playing with gender roles to make us look at them afresh — Naomi Wolf

I think there is some truth to the fact that yeah, okay, cool, obviously the more mainstream kind of easier-to-grasp-onto dance music has become popular, but that holds true with almost any genre. It wasn't like the Sex Pistols hit the radio. It was poppier versions of that is what hit. It's never, like, the true core stuff. — Kaskade

In eras past, mainstream culture was blandly, blindly complacent, so underground music was angry and dissatisfied. But now, mainstream culture isn't complacent, it's stupid and angry; underground culture reacts by becoming smarter, more serene. That's not wimpy - it's powerful and productive. — Michael Azerrad

[H]e asked Renee, "What does rock and roll have today that it didn't have in the sixties?" Renee said, "Tits," which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl
that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way
hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do. — Rob Sheffield

I can't judge how another person does their [music] work. Everyone has a choice and the music industry is much more open that it was when I was younger. Certain things are gone, others have developed, but everyone makes their choices. Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public. I don't feel it's my place to judge. I just look at things as a fan, I like or or I don't like it. — Patti Smith

I didn't grow up watching TV or going to McDonald's or listening to mainstream music. Like, the casting agents are looking elsewhere for the cheerleader role. — Summer Phoenix

The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream. — Ian Schrager

I grew up listening to Switchfoot. I love Switchfoot; they're a great band. John Foreman is awesome. I really dig mainstream pop music, but I also have a heart for jazz and rock. Oh! Coldplay! I cannot miss Coldplay! I think 'Fix You' is one of the most brilliantly written songs ever. It's, like, my favorite song of all time. — Shane Harper

Alternative music is no longer alternative once it's in the mainstream. — Kurt Cobain

I think I fall into a lot of cracks in terms of I'm too something. I'm too this, I'm too that. And my music has never really had a home. I've been this floating alternative. I'm too mainstream for alternative. I'm too alternative for mainstream. And I'm just kind of wandering. — K.d. Lang

I want to be enriched by the music I listen to. That's the reason it never really exists in the mainstream. Because that's not what most people are after. — Conor Oberst

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. — Christopher Ryan

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music. — John R. Rickford

Pop music has always been about the mainstream and what appeals to the public. — Patti Smith

American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows. — Cornel West

What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing! — Pete La Roca

I think Edward Sharpe's music is counter-cultural music in the strangest sense where you have a time now where love, optimism, hope and community are uncool and not part of the mainstream culture. — Alex Ebert

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive. — Colin Meloy

Songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic ... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with. — Bob Dylan

Run DMC brought us out of that underground-only feel. They brought rap above ground and made it respectable as an art form to mainstream music. — Ice Cube

I don't know if I would qualify as mainstream. I think I have managed to function pretty successfully on the fringes of the music world and have been able to play exactly what I have wanted the way I have wanted. — Pat Metheny

I grew up singing ballads, but what I really wanted to get into was the mainstream music on the radio because I really love the beats and everything. — Jessica Sanchez

Many secular observers and spiritual practitioners alike mistake mystical chanting as a kind of anthropological curiosity or interesting musical diversion from secular mainstream entertainment, sometimes labeling it 'world' or 'folk' music. But uttering or chanting spells, mantras or prayers shouldn't be regarded as a romantic excursion to a distant past, or faraway place, or as an escape from our everyday stresses, for relaxation or entertainment. These sounds are meant to be experienced as the timeless unity of energy currents. The chanting of ancient esoteric sounds enables us to realize we are never separate from the one continuously existing omnipresent vibration of the cosmos. — Zeena Schreck

There was a long time in my life where I made music that I thought my friends would like, or that I thought would get me a record deal, or what I thought I was supposed to make because that's what I was seeing in mainstream. I didn't know myself; I didn't find myself musically or, in real life. — Danny Brown

You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews. — Warren Ellis

I am so all over the place with my music taste, it's ridiculous. It is! I mean, I find myself listening to weird things like hardcore techno music and then I'll be listening to mainstream hip-hop music. But it's like I am so crazy with my music taste. I'll listen to a song, I'll become obsessed with it, and then I'm on to the next one. So it's just very inconsistent. — Taylor Lautner

MTV definitely has the effect of narrowing the range of music that hits the mainstream. On the other hand, isn't that the effect of television in general? — Ann Powers

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core. — Nigel Kennedy

Because people love music, I feel it's my responsibility to produce more of the music and to get it out to more people, so like I said, If the mainstream route does that without compromising me being happy as a person then that's something I'll do. — Jhene Aiko

In the '90s, the radio was still alive with all different kinds of points of view, and I think that's why people are longing for that time. It was the first time that alternative music broke through to the mainstream. — Shirley Manson

All the things I used to count on to get my music out there - record companies, they're all gone. And radio stations, they're gone - they're completely controlled by the government. If they're not controlled by the government, they're controlled by a programmer who's controlled by the government. Mainstream radio is suspect. You can't trust it. — Neil Young

I would love to hear all types of Christian artists played all over the world. I'd love to hear good, positive mainstream music played all over the place. I'd love to be able to bring music together. But I have not deserted Christ. I have not deserted my faith. — Stacie Orrico

Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it; it's, like, 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old. — Robert Glasper

I love to read about music and about art, but I don't try and take things about mythology or guidelines as to how I'm to behave as an artist. It's the realm of intellectual debate. Actually, more and more my direction is trying to get further away from being self-conscious of what the parameters are of the mainstream, where it intersects with the underground. — Emily Haines