A Quote by Etta James

It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation. — © Etta James
It's the same thing now. When I go onstage the young people scream and holler as much as the older generation.
I always want to be doing both to travel as a teacher and lecturer, and to be a musician. I think in this generation institutionalizing the art form and spreading it to the younger generation through education is really important for all artists to have some hand in. Right now in popular culture and the mainstream, it's not a big part at all. I think education by young artists talking to young people, not just older people talking to young people, it gives an experience never felt before. I think over the years it will do a lot for the music.
My thing is you just have to try to feel young and stay young. Obviously you get a little older, but I still want my music to be young. I don't want to sound like an old dad onstage, so you just have to write music that sounds young.
Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.
When I first became famous, I didn't know if I could go where I wanted to because I didn't know how people were going to act. Some folks would scream and holler, and I didn't know what to do with that.
I don't know how many times I heard older people, and not just parents but just older people, say, 'Oh, my God. Your generation is just totally nuts. You have no sense of what it was really like, when it was great.' And every generation has that same feeling, you know?
It is not new for the older generation to bewail the indolence of the young, and there is a tendency for the latter to maintain much of the older ethic screened by a new semantics and an altered ideology.
As I get older, I find the things that I thought would be sorted by now aren't. The idea of writing stuff like that for a much older generation was incredibly appealing.
Now, it is much more difficult for young people coming to New York. But also when you're young, you have more time to interact with one another, to discover yourself with people of your generation.
The entertainment industry is always targeted at young people. Understandably so, as they are the key consumers. The young are the ones who are falling in love, starting out in life; older people aren't. Nobody thinks, 'Now I'm going to write a film about an older person.'
I'm getting older and the performance onstage was definitely, it was a bit sexier, but it wasn't too much. I don't want to scare off my fans. At the same time my fans are growing up with me, and I don't want to go way over the top.
There's one thing about freedom ... each generation of people begins by thinking they've got it for the first time in history, and ends by being sure the generation younger than themselves have too much of it. It can't really always have been increasing at the rate people suppose, or there would be more of it by now.
As an older generation, we need to give all our young people love and the possibility of realizing their dreams. For instance, if I get really political, the fact that some people can't go to college, can't even think about college, that's not American; that's not right.
You put as much effort as you can when they're young into trying to teach them to be good people or make them the best they can be, and they're older now, my kids. I'm at that stage where I let them go, and you just hope that all that nurturing you did earlier on sticks, and you launched good people out there.
Even very recently, the elders could say: 'You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply: 'You never have been young in the world I am young in, and you never can be.' ... the older generation will never see repeated in the lives of young people their own unprecedented experience of sequentially emerging change. This break between generations is wholly new: it is planetary and universal.
I was part of the first generation of girls and women to be educated and go to grammar school even if we didn't have much money. Then that generation went, 'OK, great', and went into medicine or the police, and hit this wall of discrimination from older men who hadn't caught up.
I think that young people understand me perfectly. I think that's the luckiest thing about my career, that I get older and they get younger, and it didn't stop with my generation.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!