A Quote by Ne-Yo
Back in the day, Motown was on the pulse of young America. It wasn't about just dope contemporary. It was pop, it was R&B, it was all of that.
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So, you play today! You don't worry about what's gone, 'cause that's already gone and you can't bring what's gone back. It doesn't happen that way. So, every day's a new day and just play it as it comes. And I turned out to be a singer that was not on dope.
That's what I used to do; I would just go into the studio and just rap. But it's all about coming up with dope concepts and dope hooks.
I think Lil Uzi is dope. Future is dope. I love Young Thug. I'm a huge Young Thug fan.
When I graduated, everyone was like, 'You got to do pop and R&B to make it,' like very contemporary pop and R&B. I tried for a little while, but I just realized my voice wasn't quite fitting some of the records that I was doing.
They call it the rope-a-dope. Well, I'm the dope. Ali just laid on the rope and I, like a dope, kept punching until I got tired. But he was probably the most smart fighter I've ever gotten into the ring with.
My main influences are pop and folk music - Bob Lind, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, the Motown collection, The Zombies, Elliott Smith, and a ton of 70's AM radio hits. I love powerpop too.
Remember Motown? Not just the driving music that swept the nation and the world, but the vibrant energy of the Motor City itself, symbolizing the heyday of America. Today, a derelict Detroit is testament to what America has squandered and what it has become.
I don't have one thing I go back to, but we listen to a lot of music in the bus, and we always get a few songs or a few records that end up being themes for the tour. On tour I read all of George Saunders' short stories and all of Alice Munro's short stories. George Saunders is who has taught me about this question about whether or not love is possible in the contemporary world, with all of its simulations and all of its pop and divergences and all of the confusion and distraction. Whether or not contemporary reality is actually hospitable to love.
Motown was pop, Atlantic was R&B.
The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from . . . the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.
This film business, perhaps more so in America than in Europe, has always been about young sexuality. It's not true of theatre, but in America, film audiences are young. It's not an intellectual cinema in America.
America's a funny place. Every time I've come over it just feels absolutely gigantic and massive. I've always had good shows there, but I just go and come back, feeling like another singer/songwriter in a sea of thousands of singer/songwriters. I don't really know what "breaking it in America" is or means. I just focus on touring day-by-day, and show-by-show, and see where it goes.
I'm not one of those artists who doubts that they made dope-ass records. From the first record to now, each record has gotten better. I started dope, so I've just gotten doper and doper and dopest and super dope.
I think that the ideal of young womanhood as it's seen in pop culture specifically is a really kind of vapid, conceited, concerned with money and looks kind of thing that you'll see in a lot of reality shows. And I think that's really damaging, not just because it's a terrible role model to put forth, but that it also puts across this idea to the American public that this is what young women are like, that this is what all young women in America are like.
History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.
The only recording studio was in Motown - it was called Tamla/Motown at that time and we used to audition there because Smokey Robinson was at that studio and Berry Gordy was the president. I remember asking Smokey to listen to my group and he did. For the first couple of years we were just singing background. We used to back up Marvin Gaye; Mary Wells was there then, Marv Johnson, the Marvelettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, Junior Walker and the All-Stars.
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