Top 40 Quotes & Sayings

Hip-hop is not something we do, it's something we live. It's the way we dress, the way we talk ... everybody bobbing to the same beat. It's a culture, and you have to find your own place in that culture. Top 10 or Top 40 can't dictate that. They can only dictate what's marketable. — Erykah Badu

I was holding someone captive and all that was going through my mind was a Billboard Top 40 love song. I was going to hell. — Goldy Moldavsky

Right now I'm listening to a lot of Top 40 music, because THAT'S MY JOB. — Al Yankovic

The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley its name, allegedly for the tinny-sounding pianos passersby heard from the upper-story windows of the row houses. The sheet-music sellers also employed piano players in their street-level stores, who would perform the Top 40 of the 1920s for browsing customers. — John Seabrook

I listen to all sorts of things. I get kind of embarrassed with my iPod, because I am a top-40 type of girl; I am not the kind of person to introduce people to new music. — Chrissy Teigen

I got my influences from '70s bands - Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, blah blah blah. When I was growing up, we had all these crazy bands on the Top 40. Today, if Pink Floyd released 'Money,' it wouldn't even get played. — Al Jourgensen

You never know that this is the moment when you're in the moment. When I was sixteen I moved to a smaller town in Vermont, and at that time I didn't have a band to play in. So I was forced to play in Top 40 bands and fraternity bands and wedding bands. That was all pop music, but I was listening to Weather Report and classical music. Then I went to Berklee College of Music in 1978, and you had Victor Bailey there, and Steve Vai. And suddenly I was among my ilk. — Stuart Hamm

This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it. — Bernie Sanders

The top 15 contenders for the Republican nomination own at least 40 guns among them. If we elect a Republican president no one is hopping over the White House fence ever again. — Conan O'Brien

I listen to all kinds of music, but I've always been a really big fan of Top 40 radio. If I'm in my car, that's what I listen to. — Aaron Tveit

I'm a Top 40 record guy. I remember the hits and don't remember the flops. Something in my brain blocks them out. — Steve Cropper

There's no pressure for me to go out there and say, I've got to have a top 40 hit because it's not going to happen. — Elton John

For 40 years, the American middle class has been disappearing. Millions of people are working longer hours for lower wages despite a huge increase in technology and productivity. And what we have seen during that period is a massive transfer of trillions of dollars from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent of America — Lindsey Graham

There's top 40 R&B/hip-hop, which is probably sexy but you wouldn't listen to it for a musical awakening. — Lotic

I'm a huge Top 40 lover. — Katharine McPhee

You still have Top 40 radio now, but it's 40 different stations. There aren't many hits that everybody knows, and there aren't many real superstars. — Al Yankovic

You can get in a car in Maine and drive all the way to California and hear the same Top 40 songs on the same chain broadcasters," bemoaned the report. — John Seabrook

I have specific playlists for arrivals in different cities. Tokyo skews new wave, Paris more jazz, and New York is Top 40. — Chris Benz

I just felt it was my job to show that there is no easy way to success, and that anyone who gets even just one Top 40 hit deserves their moment in the sun. I accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. That is the timeless thing. — Casey Kasem

It is one of my biggest regrets that Niall Quinn was not here during my time ... I felt he was an intelligent player. It would have been a good combination with Thierry Henry. What I like with Quinn is if you look at the player who played next to him, he always scored 40 goals because he had a hand for his head and he just put the ball where you were. He was a team player. A top-class player makes other players look good and he had that player. — Arsene Wenger

'American Top 40' allowed me to be current without my having to force change to keep up with things. The new songs kept us up to date, so every show sounded fresh. — Casey Kasem

When I was young, I used to hear people say, 'He's a golden boy. Look at that guy. Can you imagine what he's going to be like when he grows up?' Well, I unfortunately bought into that. And I hadn't even found myself. Quite honestly, I was running from myself. But I knew how to work Top 40 radio. — Glenn Beck

When I used to play nightclubs, you had to play Top 40 or favorite oldies that maybe people could relate to. — Rick Danko

I feel like I'm doing something in Atlanta that nobody ever did as far as rap. If it happens to end up on the top 40 or the pop charts, it doesn't mean I meant to go pop. It's just where the music took me. It started at the bottom, and it rises. — Nayvadius Cash

I love all types of music. I love top 40 dance pop, hip-hop, I don't even know what they call it now. I'm a huge fan of all that. — Dustin Lynch

The Top 40 is geared toward 20 and under, not 20 and up. That's the audience I'm geared to. — Michael Bolton

In 2012, 40 of the top companies to work for were also among the top companies in social media. — Jay Baer

When I play live in restaurants and cafes, I don't play my own stuff. I play jazz and 'American Songbook' standards, and I'll fuse it with top 40. — Darren Criss

I want to go back to the format that radio started with rock n' roll, with country artists and rhythm and blues with that oldies type feeling. I want to put it all together and create a Top 40 of rhythm and blues and country and straight blues with Wolfman at the reins. — Wolfman Jack

Drugs, sex, booze, all the stuff that we wanted to do. The problem was that we didn't want to learn the top 40 'cause most of the music was awful and we had this other idea about what we wanted to do. — Wayne Kramer

I would say that everyone that you see who is successful in the mainstream, at the top of Billboard, who has a Top 40 hit ... at some point, unless they're a complete fabrication of the industry with no identity of their own and a carbon copy clone of someone else, they in themselves started out being underground. — Immortal Technique

the man with one hand turned on an enormous radio and tuned it to a mastermix station where the songs are not sung so much as bleated. Bleated and repeated. — David Sedaris

What I have said to my team is that at a point such as this, with 40% adjustment in our currency, it means that Malawians are paying the price. While that is going on, they need to see, us, the commitment on our part, particularly right at the top. The political will needs to go through this with the people, side by side. — Joyce Banda

The listener has a responsibility that not everyone wants to take, especially if you are putting on the new Top 40 record. — Taylor Ho Bynum

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical. — Skylar Grey

I want to be played on the radio. I want to have Top 40 hits, — Avril Lavigne

We need to be clear in calling out evil for what it is. When people will behead a child, and when people will leave people starving on top of a mountain without food or water - 40,000 of them - I don't care what religion it is: It's evil. — Mike Huckabee

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. — Vladimir Nabokov

There are about 300,000 neighborhoods in the United States, and more than half of them have at least one millionaire living there. Most millionaires drive American cars. Out of the top 30 or 40 makes and models, Ford is number one, with about 10 percent of the market share. — Thomas J. Stanley

You can live well here. Compared to the top 40 metro areas in the nation, Charlotte has the 12th lowest cost of living. — Harry Hoover

Well, I was in a band. I was the singer with a band called the Soul Satisfiers. I sang then quite a bit of Jazz and some Top 40 stuff. — Gloria Gaynor

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques. — Art Linkletter

I listen to top 40, old country, blues ... I'm really into Roger Miller. — King Tuff

I don't think that I'm a top 40 artist in any way. So I don't think I'm that mainstream. — Lisa Marie Presley

Maybe it's because One Direction was just on 'SNL,' or because I'm playing The Wanted on my Top 40 show, but in terms of boy bands, we're seeing this resurgence, and it's happening, whether you like it or not! — Carson Daly

In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt's funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap. — Rob Sheffield

Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can't major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There's plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won't be easy, but it's not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets. — Peter Thiel

The biggest danger we face is overfishing. We literally could fish out our oceans, some scientists believe, in the next 40, 50, 60 years. We are fishing out the top of the food chain, and it's pretty crucial because about 200 million people depend on fish and fishing for their livelihood, and about a billion people, mostly in poorer countries, depend on fish for their protein. So this is a big problem. Good news is, it's fixable. — Ted Danson

Ooh! Jesus Christ had dreads, so shake 'em.
I ain't got none, but I'm planning on growing some.
Imagine all the Hebrews going dumb ...
Dancing on top of chariots and turning tight ones. — E-40

That the north star is the brightest in the night sky. I'd guess about 9 out of 10 people think this. But it does not require a grant from the National Science Foundation to learn the answer. The North Star is not even in the top 40 in the night sky. It's the 49th brightest star. Rather dull and boring by most measures. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Top management should spend 40 to 50 percent of its time educating and motivating its people ... — Buck Rodgers

I'm a businesswoman. I am a music lover. I like for people to like my music. When you listen to top 40 radio, you hear pop stuff. You hear rock stuff. You hear all these different influences. — Lee Ann Womack

You couldnt get a job playing in a club unless you played so much Top 40 and so many Beatles songs. I just went into a sort of revolt. — Gregg Allman

This music isn't Top 40, we really stand out from anyone. — Dustin Diamond

I love Top 40 pop, don't get me wrong; I just don't think that there's anyone in Top 40 pop that's 'real.' — Lorde

When you consider that a steelworker who's making $40,000 a year has virtually the same tax burden as someone who's making $400,000 a year, you see that there are inequities. This administration has used the tax code to accelerate wealth to the top. Most of the tax breaks have gone to people in the top bracket. — Dennis Kucinich

Why's it okay to draw spaceships if you're seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you're asking to be picked on? Why's it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages? — David Mitchell

Being shoved into the top-40 scene was an unusual experience. It was great I'd become accessible to a huge audience but not terribly fulfilling. — David Bowie

I took my acting very seriously. I did over 40 films, and naturally, some of them were called B-movies because the woman was at the top of the billing. Women couldn't star in their own movies. — Mamie Van Doren

Me having a beautiful wife and great family and friends around me, all the money I've got, all the things that I've got, a Ferrari that I just ripped the top off of and turned into a convertible, the rings I got, the two mansions on the water, a master's in criminal justice, I'm a cop, plus I look good. So me shooting 40 percent at the foul line is just God's way of saying that nobody's perfect. If I shot 90 percent from the line, it just wouldn't be right. — Shaquille O'Neal

Then I take a dump. Feel better. Take off my clothes and step into the pool. Ice water. But great. I walk along toward the deep end of the pool, the water rising inch by inch, chilling me. Then I plunge below the water. It's restful. The world doesn't know where I am. I come up, swim to the far edge, find the ledge, sit there. It must be about the 9th or 10th race. The horses are still running. I plunge again into the water, being aware of my stupid whiteness, of my age hanging onto me like a leech. Still, it's OK. I should have been dead 40 years ago. I rise to the top, swim to the far edge, get out. — Charles Bukowski

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours
it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it. — Greil Marcus

The latest Congressional Budget Office figures show that the top 1 percent of income earners in the United States paid 39 percent of federal income taxes while earning 18 percent of pretax income and the top 5 percent of income earners paid 61 percent of federal income taxes while earning 31 percent of pretax income. Indeed, the top 40 percent of income earners paid 99.4 percent of federal income taxes. The bottom 40 percent of income earners paid no federal income tax and received 3.8 percent from the tax system. And the middle 20 percent of income earners pay only 4.4 percent of federal income taxes.3 — Mark R. Levin

My writing voice is a little quirkier, more singer-songwriter-y than the Top 40 stuff I cover. — Sam Tsui

I had always sung in my dad's shop. I worked there after school, and I'd be singing along with the top-40 records of the day. — Neil Diamond

When I was in top 40 bands, I always had to learn new material and new styles. — Kenneth Edmonds

So. Yes. We're all dying. We're all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn't happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp's mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go 'Ooof!' whenever they stand up or sit down. men visibly age, every day
but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage. — Caitlin Moran

10 years ago [in 2006], nearly 90 percent of those albums sold enough in that year to reach Gold status. 10 years later, about 30 percent were eligible. With the new rules, we figure about 40 percent of the top 200 best-sellers for the year will be eligible. We were very cautious in our approach to changing how we calculate what is eligible because the integrity of the process is our foremost consideration. It's difficult to get certified sales awards, and it's a big deal and we didn't want there to be a huge change in how many would be eligible. — Cary Sherman

My audience is the baby-boomers, the bulk of the population. This is also a group that is being ignored by most record companies because they're not the Top 40 hit singles market. They forget these people still listen to music. — Helen Reddy

After 40 years of not playing, I admit I'm totally in love with my guitar. It's a Froggy Bottom acoustic steel string guitar. All I have to do is hit a couple of clean chords and the endorphins are right there. It's like the top of my head has come off and stardust and magic have fallen in. — April Gornik

In 1985, the top five percent of the households - the wealthiest five percent - had net worth of $8 trillion - which is a lot. Today, after serial bubble after serial bubble, the top five per cent have net worth of $40 trillion. The top five percent have gained more wealth than the whole human race had created prior to 1980. — David Stockman

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent. — David Brooks

Imagine, a First World country founded on egalitarian principles in which the top 20 per cent of households have 84 per cent of the wealth, while the bottom 40 per cent have 0.3 per cent; and one family, the Waltons, owns more than the bottom 40 per cent of US families combined; and the ratio of CEO salary to unskilled worker is 354 to 1 (fifty years ago it was 20 to 1). A minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which is 34 per cent less than workers on the minimum were getting in 1968. More than 20 per cent of children in the United States live in poverty, more than twice the rate of any European country. With a quarter of totalitarian China's population, democratic America has about the same number of people in jail. — Don Watson

I think I get a lot of ideas from when I was a kid, listening to Casey Kasem's 'American Top 40.' — Sufjan Stevens

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding ... — Flannery O'Connor

You certainly don't hear any country music on pop radio today. But for a while you did, and it was a lovely thing to have all the different genres of music cohabitating the Top 40 - the folk sound, The Beatles, the British sound, the Motown sounds, that kind of light country - it was a welcome relief after a few hard rock records. Everyone was sharing the airwaves, and I think it was a beautiful time for American music. — Jimmy Webb

On 'American Top 40' the Kasem voice soared and swooped, like an expert aural acrobat, through promos, jingles and dedications, usually rising to a dramatic peak for the top-selling song of the week. — Richard Corliss

So you open your mouth and listen to yourself say, "I want eight thousand a day. Plus expenses."
This is the polite, industry-standard way of saying "piss off, I'm not interested." You did the math over your morning coffee: You want to earn 100K a year, what with those bonuses you've been pulling on top of your salary. (Besides, a euro doesn't buy what it used to.) There are 250 working days in a year, and a contractor works for roughly 40 per cent of the time, so you need to charge yourself out at 2.5 times your payroll rate, or 1000 a day in order to meet your target. Not interested in the job? Pitch unrealistically high. You never know ...
"Done," says Mr. Pin-Stripe, staring at you expressionlessly. And it is at that point that you realize you are well and truly fucked. — Charles Stross

Super casual music listeners. That's most of the people in the world. And you have to understand, that's why Top 40 radio exists. It's not there for people who seek out music and who love music. — Michael Stipe

I credit God with giving me the idea for 'Top 40.' — Casey Kasem