A Quote by Paul Smoker

When I was in high school I made the discovery that if I was playing in a jazz club, and there were black people in the club, if I could get the black people to like what I was doing, I was on the right track. So I began to play to those people because they knew what the authentic music was. I've always had that in the back of my head.

Paul Smoker

Quote Topics

Always Authentic Back Because Began Black Black People Club Could Discovery Doing Get Had Head High High School If I Could Jazz Knew Like Made Music People Play Playing Right Right Track School Those Track Were

Quote Author

Paul Smoker
May 8, 1941 - May 14, 2016

Even in Jamaica, your own country, coming into youth cricket you need to be from an upscale high school or have a light skin. As you get older you get used to the culture. My club, Lucas Cricket Club, was the only one to accept black people back in the day.

Chris Gayle

I always tell people that I have never ever gone dancing in my life. But that's the point. It's the point of dreaming of doing it, imagining doing it. My music is like a fantasy version of it, not a practical version of it. With the way a club DJ would make a track - they are in the club, they know how to get people excited. I don't know how to get people excited. I'm just imagining euphoria; I'm not necessarily feeling it.

Memory Tapes

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.

Toni Morrison

I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.

Soledad O'Brien

From middle school to the first year of high school, I went to a school in Miami that seemed like a private country club. The whole cheerleader, football player, clique-y thing there was terrifying. Those people were so scary. They're the scariest kinds of people because they are idolized by their peers.

Zoe Kravitz

When I was 13, I used to go to a jazz club. The owner of the club became my first business manager. She was very gutsy and had a lot of friends, one of whom happened to be the head of jazz at Columbia at the time. That's how it all began.

Johnny Mathis

I was actually the head of the violin after-school club. And then I was also the head of the dance club, the popping club. So one day, just by coincidence, we had to hold the two clubs at the same time. I had to go back and forth. And that's when the idea came up for dancing and playing violin at the same time.

Henry Lau

A lot of racism going on in the world right now. Who's more racist? Black people or white people? Black people. You know why? 'Cuz we hate black people too! Everything white people don't like about black people, black people really don't like about black people.

Chris Rock

I think that the reason my records are able to live forever in the club is because I actually like to be in the club. I don't go to the club to do VIP or get bottles or nothin' - I go to the club, I enjoy the people, I see what the people are vibin' off, and I see what makes me go crazy in the club also, and that has a lot of influence on what I bring to the table when I'm thinking of making a big club record.

Pitbull

When we were younger, playing a bar or a club, we did what we did to get as many people to like what we were doing. I wanted the person in the back of the room to like it as much as the ones in the front. That's how I've always looked at it.

Angus Young

In high school, I was so obsessed with the movie that I started an actual 'Highlander' club with my two best friends, Mike Levy and David Sirota. What began as a few geeks hitting each other with swords we made in woodshop soon became a school-wide game with 20 people playing. It became so disruptive that the administration had to shut it down.

Adam F. Goldberg

When my ban was relaxed I began playing club cricket. Imagine, for a person who had played at Lord's, to play with a club team who didn't have proper kit against another club team in Lahore.

Mohammad Amir

As a black person on the outside, because there's so much black art and so much of black people's work circulating, so many people imitating what black people do, you would think that there'd be more black people on the business side. It didn't cross my mind that every label head, for the most part, is a white guy.

Kelela

We have African-Americans and black people getting behind the scenes more and more, we get true black images in television and film...because we have black people behind them. They can tell stories from those points of view and bring to life those characters who have yet to be shown. As long as we have people behind the camera just as much as in front of the camera doing the work, then we'll always be good.

Keke Palmer

We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.