A Quote by Rebecca Ferguson
I like listening to old soul music. I like Sam Cooke. When I was growing up, the first things I was listening to was Whitney Houston and Cher. They were really big inspirations for me.
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I don't know exactly what genre to put it in, I just know that I grew up listening to a lot of soul music - Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Prince, and Whitney Houston. I was inspired by all these great big voices, and I try to do music that's timeless.
When I came home my parents were listening to Pakistani Qawwali music, like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, they're listening to music from Mali, like Ali Farka Toure, they're listening to Brazilian songwriters, like Gilberto Gil, to opera, to Neil Young even, things you don't hear as a kid in Caracas. I love all the music they turned me onto.
You know, the funny thing was that I grew up listening to, like Whitney Houston and Cece Winans, and a lot of American singers.
When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big.
When I was a little bitty kid, I was listening to the stuff my parents were listening to. My mom was a huge Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige fan. My dad had a cover band that I sang with, and he loved Parliament, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Clapton, the blues, James Brown.
I'd been listening to African-American music since the first record I ever bought, which was by Sam Cooke. And it sounds more like my private thoughts that I never thought I would be able to articulate - I never thought I would be able to express publicly.
I remember listening to Cube's music when I was like 14 years old, my friends listening to it up in Toronto.
I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, because that was new music for me. I really hadn't been up on them. I mean, I'd heard of them, but I wasn't up on their music. And I kept listening to Radiohead, and I was like, Man, I want to make hip-hop that feels like Radiohead. I want to make hip-hop that can use guitars and soul and jazz and just fuse it all together.
I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
Influences come from everywhere. I don't really feel like I had too many influences for the first record because I grew up listening to music in church, and that was pretty much it. I didn't really grow up listening to AC/DC and all those bands.
One of my biggest inspirations growing up was Whitney Houston, so I was devastated to hear about her passing. I'm from East Orange, New Jersey, and started singing at New Hope Baptist Church, so she was like my fellow Jersey girl.
I'm an old soul. I like the Nat King Cole; Sam Cooke is my favorite singer of all time. But I'm into neo-soul; I'm into R&B. Some of the modern stuff appeals to me, but most of it comes from an older time.
The only music I was listening to for ages was old soul. So I wasn't listening to a lot of new music - especially indie music.
I guess it's kind of the obvious thing for me to do 'cuz it's what I grew up listening to. The songs growing up and everything kind of seem like old music to them, but to me, it's just... good music. And of course I did grow up in England in the 21st Century and that does come into it as well.
I love jazz. So to me, there are two main types of jazz. There's dancing jazz, and then there's listening jazz. Listening jazz is like Thelonius Monk or John Coltrane, where it's a listening experience. So that's what I like; I like to make stuff that you listen to. It's not really meant to get you up; it's meant to get your mind focused. That's why you sit and listen to jazz. You dance to big band or whatever, but for the most part, you sit and listen to jazz. I think it comes from that aesthetic, trying to take that jazz listening experience and put it on hip-hop.
I really enjoy listening to Japanese pop aka J-Pop and I also like listening to anime songs as well. Both of these types of music are unique to Japanese culture and listening to these types of music gets me going.
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