Music Bowie Quotes & Sayings

It's much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn't listen to was pretty much that. I mean everything, from jazz to classical to popular. And Tibetan horns were a great part of it in 1966, '67. — David Bowie

I made a more mature approach to industrial music. — David Bowie

I grew up in Deptford in south London, and at that time I used to wear toppers, loon pants and tonic suits from shops like Take 6 and Topman. I was a bit of a soul boy, but I had a very eclectic taste in music - I was into James Brown and Bowie; and I was the only kid in the neighbourhood who would also be listening to Chopin. — Gary Oldman

These people are interested in a wide variety of music, and that's what we're into. — Lester Bowie

What I've been trying to do for years is to get the music played on a station other than jazz stations, you know, to expand the audience. — Lester Bowie

Music is very important. It's important as a tool for learning, it can be a tool for healing, it can be no telling what, as long as we remain free to be able to create the music, to be able to experiment and to really research, and to really get time to develop the music. — Lester Bowie

I was not jealous of his intelligence - he is entirely superficial, which is why he never knows what to look like. Or what music to make. Or whether to be a boy or a girl. — Nico

After people like Lennon and Dylan, I think David Bowie brought a very modernistic intelligence and the necessity for change. I think he was completely positive, certainly through one and a half decades of completely overriding influence, in the best of popular music, and I take my bloody hat off to him! — Roger Meddows Taylor

When the musical keyboard was created in the 1970's, you had electronic geeks that had no background in music created these devises and gave them to musicians that had no background in electronics. The result was some of the wierd sounds that came out in the '70s. — David Bowie

People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture they were brought up in. People have attention spans of five seconds and as much depth as a glass of water. — David Bowie

I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them. — David Bowie

Bowie talks in great, voluble torrents, darting from one topic to the next, parenthesizing and then parenthesizing the parentheses, as if he has too many ideas for one conversation. — Sean Egan

Written in pain, written in awe
By a puzzled man who questioned
What we were here for — David Bowie

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music. — David Bowie

I need to do a concert to celebrate David Bowie's electronic music. And in so doing, I'm not taking a step back, I'm taking a step forward and presenting it in its entirety so people can understand this type of visionary. — Carlos Alomar

I didn't know much about him, and I wasn't a big country music fan. I listened to the Beatles and David Bowie, so I didn't know a lot about him. — Joaquin Phoenix

And these children
that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations.
They're quite aware
of what they're going through ... — David Bowie

David Bowie told me my music sounds like tomorrow — Lorde

I think music should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself. It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. — David Bowie

I liked rock music, I kind of moved into that sphere, somehow thinking that somewhere along the line I'd be able to put the two together. And I suppose I very nearly did with the Ziggy character. — David Bowie

Rock's always been the devil's music. — David Bowie

I felt I really wanted to back off from music completely and just work within the visual arts in some way. I started painting quite passionately at that time. — David Bowie

Ben had never seen his mother cry before, and it startled him, so he didn't ask again. Right afterward she'd put on her favorite record and played a mysterious song called "Space Oddity," about an astronaut named Major Tom who gets lost in space. She used to listen to the song over and over again. With her eyes closed, she'd place the palm of her hand against the fabric of the speaker, so she could feel it vibrate against her skin. — Brian Selznick

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour
drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine
don't think you knew you were in this song — David Bowie

Rather than really have, like a close relationship to anything that's coming out today, people are just, they've got it on as background music. It's kind of the same way the cabdrivers use music; it's very disposable. — David Bowie

The problem is that the internet IS some kid in a basement with an opinion. The fact that David Bowie and Elton John told me that they were fans of Helmet - or Neil Young - that means something to me because I grew up on their music and they're great musicians ... That means more to me than some guy who hates the fact that my hair is short. — Page Hamilton

I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music. — David Bowie

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist. — David Bowie

I was brought up with beautiful music - Nat King Cole and Glen Miller from my dad, and my mum loved Judy Garland and Doris Day - brilliant stuff. Through my brothers and sisters I heard David Bowie and The Specials, The Carpenters, Meatloaf and The Rolling Stones. — Imelda May

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. — David Bowie

I think people are 'just creative,' and this can be expressed in a number of ways. Bob Dylan and David Bowie create both music and art. — Ronnie Wood

David Bowie's music is a moving target. Just when you think you got the bullseye, it shifts. And to his credit, on to death, it's still shifting. David Bowie is a moving target, even after he's gone. — Carlos Alomar

Without David Bowie, popular music as we know it pretty much wouldn't exist. — Moby

The first thing that got to me was seeing David Bowie on a children's TV show, but Bowie was way beyond my aspirations. The Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch came out in 1977 and it had a breakdown of the recording costs, then you saw Pete Shelley playing a broken guitar from Woolworths. We already had an idea of the kind of music we wanted to do, but punk showed us a way to do it. — Edwyn Collins

They're not just interested in one sort of music any more. — Lester Bowie

I was a huge Bowie fan since I was 12 years old. That was the first 'punk' rock I got into in the Seventies. I didn't find out about a lot of the other stuff that was going on, like New York Dolls and Roxy Music, until a lot later. — Buzz Osborne

I never heard so many kids talk about just doing anything to be famous. I mean, yeah, fame is part of the deal when you're a kid and you think, I wanna go into music, but everybody that I knew was really doing it because of their love for it. I don't see so much of that anymore. — David Bowie

The music we play is kind of hard to explain. It's music that we really feel. — Lester Bowie

I think hip-hop is actually one of the most challenging things that's happened in music in a long time. — David Bowie

I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance. — David Bowie

His name is David Bowie and he's nineteen. Would you like to meet him? — Tony Visconti

I think the only music I didn't listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day. — David Bowie

I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated. — Dries Van Noten

The best DJs in the world know how to pull in music from all over the place and make it work as a cohesive whole. — David Bowie

[David] Bowie went on to make best-selling music - funk, dance music, electronic music, while also being influenced by cabaret and jazz. — David Bowie

I love all kinds of music. My dad's from London, so he loves David Bowie, the Stones, The Clash. I grew up with that influence while loving poetry and loving all kinds of current music. — Adam Hicks

Jazz is so difficult. A lot of people think once they've learned these licks they can get up and play them for the rest of their life. But that's not being truthful to the music 'cause it's not developing. Cats you hear that don't make no mistakes? They ain't trying to do nothing. everything they hear is on the mark, but they've played it so many times ... I've built a whole career out of making mistakes! — Lester Bowie

I listen to a lot of old music, like Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. — Sophie McShera

I was obsessed with David Bowie - still am. He's a babe, a total babe. His music is killer; his visuals are beautiful. — Charlotte Sullivan

Bowie mattered to me. He reinvented himself so many times - it must have been a daring statement to do that, risking failure. And hanging out with him and seeing him like that - he's my dad's age, born in the same month - when you find someone who's been through a really dark period, which most of his music I care about is from, Low, Lodger, "Heroes" era ... But he came out of it and made something that mattered. — Trent Reznor

Because I believe that the future of the music lies in the Internet. It can be sold on the Internet. — Lester Bowie

They were missing all the enthusiasm, the creativity; that whole excitement about the music was lost. A lot of people are really going back looking for that. — Lester Bowie

When I was younger, I was fascinated by David Bowie, for example. he had created an entire myth around himself. It was as important as his music. — Lars Von Trier

Jazz is neither specific repertoire, nor academic exercise ... but a way of life. — Lester Bowie

When I was growing up in the early '70s and really getting into music, waiting outside the record store for that 45, waiting for a single from The Dead, The Clash, David Bowie, or T-Rex or something to be there. There was something about that that was so special. — Dave Gahan

Because people really got tired, too, of the same old formatted sort of thing, and the same old formatted music. — Lester Bowie

I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important. — David Bowie

I wanted to rewrite how rock music was perceived. — David Bowie

On the other hand, what I like my music to do to me is awaken the ghosts inside of me. Not the demons, you understand, but the ghosts.
David Bowie — David Bowie

I don't know any Beatles songs. My dad never listened to Elvis or Sting or Bowie. Any band name that's on a t-shirt, I probably won't know their music, like AC/DC or whatever. I don't know what that is. As a kid, I would sing along to artists like Tania Maria. — FKA Twigs

One day in Berlin ... Eno came running in and said, 'I have heard the sound of the future.' ... he puts on 'I Feel Love', by Donna Summer ... He said, 'This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.' Which was more or less right. — David Bowie

Rock has always been THE DEVIL'S MUSIC ... I believe rock and roll is dangerous ... I feel we're only heralding SOMETHING EVEN DARKER THAN OURSELVES. — David Bowie

There was a time in America not long ago when rock 'n' roll was called race music, and white kids who wanted to go see Chuck Berry were completely forbidden. — David Bowie

If I can get that DAM trio back together again - "get the band back together" - and put on a concert of David Bowie's electronic music, that's the way I want to remember David, moving forward into the future of music. — Carlos Alomar

I love people like Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks and David Bowie - people that project themselves as characters and that contextualizes the music. — Tamaryn

If you look at the history of popular music, the most successful musicians have started out being really marginal and esoteric. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Madonna. Prince. Bruce Springsteen. Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie. Public Enemy. Nirvana. — Moby

I hated most music in the 1970s, especially disco, but Bowie was edgier. — Anton Du Beke

I had a radio show at the local college and I got kicked off the air and banished forever for playing music from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Alice Cooper, and David Bowie because (quote-unquote) "They were gay." So, things have changed quite a bit. — Anne Boleyn

We're just beginning to learn the importance of music in our society. — Lester Bowie

I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable. You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth. — David Bowie

I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does. — David Bowie

And there are a lot of people interested in creative music, there are more and more and more. — Lester Bowie

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock. — David Bowie

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old. — Emm Gryner

I guess, people like myself and Roxy Music that had a different agenda about taking up music. — David Bowie

It's just about really being sensitive, and trying to play a music that is about music. — Lester Bowie

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years. — David Bowie