Top 1200 American Pop Culture Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

With 'Torches,' I wanted to make a great pop record; I wanted every song to be exciting, not to have too much space, no long pieces of music without vocals. I kind of wanted to write the perfect pop album.

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.

The problem with my shoulders was something I inherited from my dad. The left one would pop out and then pop back in - absolute agony - during almost every game last season, so I had surgery to put it right last summer.

Anything that's ever gotten on the charts as a result of "American Idol" or "The X Factor" in the UK. It's born out of karaoke culture. It's been a long time coming, but it's absolutely affected radio.

Overseas, kids grow up in a soccer culture. The German player sees the game eons above the American player the same age.

Because I was such a student of pop culture growing up, I love that on the list of things that I got to work on in my first years out of college were 'Scream' and 'Dawson's Creek' and, ultimately now, 'The Vampire Diaries,' which generations below me grew up on and can quote. I love that. I think that is the coolest thing in the world.

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family.

The things that are going to be in all my records, for as long as I'm making them, are going to go back to who I am and where I'm from and the lifestyle that I live and come from - and I don't know how I could ever get any of that close enough to pop to be considered a pop act.

Welcome to the brave new world of American multiculturalism. From a nation of diverse peoples united by a common culture, we have become a people divided by a common malady.

I grew up watching American movies. My favorite movies have always been American, since as long as I can remember. I always had this huge respect for American filmmakers and American actors.

The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there's no way to communicate it in a wide way.

When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop.

My fans are grown now. They are not expecting me to do the bubblegum pop I did 20 years ago, even though it was pretty substantive. It was saying more than bubblegum pop says today. I am continuing where I left off.

I like the fact that I have the power to convey a lot of emotion through my songs. I like to channel that when I'm singing. I think it's just a mix of R&B, soul, but then I kind of move more into the pop world and electronic pop and stuff like that.

The Latino population has become such a presence. We are part of the American tapestry in a very profound way, in every area you can think of, and are very significant in popular culture.

Specifically, in Canada, the First Nations are often overlooked in pop culture or in general, and when things are reported about our First Nations, it's often negative things - about the hardships they face and what-not.

I remember listening to 'Songs In The Key Of Life' as a kid. Stevie Wonder has an ability to manipulate pop into something globally obtainable. Anyone can listen and enjoy it because there's something for everyone. That woke me up to the possibilities of pop music.

In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.

What makes something pop? It's really just the bed it's placed in. If I grab melodies by Black Sabbath or Metallica and take them out of their musical bed and put them into a pop context, it's not like they wouldn't translate.

As a matter of fact, I constantly tell audiences all over the world that the single greatest icon of American culture from the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" was that novel so that if we say, what conversation can we have that would lead us on a road of tolerance, and teachers have decided that if you're going to teach values in a school in America, the answer that American teachers at all kinds of schools have come up with, just let Harper Lee teach "To Kill A Mockingbird." And then all the teacher has to do is stand back and guide the discussion.

People always complain about The Grammys because they're not a pop contest, but they're not supposed to be a pop contest. They're about excellence.

I'm trying to make pop records for the middle-class, lower-middle-class - pop for the 99 percent.

I don't want to be famous or recognizable. I don't want to be critiqued about the way that I look on the Internet... I've been writing pop songs for pop stars for a couple years and see what their lives are like, and that's just not something I want.

The people who are going into music who hunger, they're going into pop music. There are some badass women who are ambitious and hungry and brave, and they're in pop.

Pop Art is industrial painting. I think the meaning of my work is that it is industrial, it's what all the world will soon become. Europe will be the same way, soon, it won't be American; it will be universal.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture, 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties, predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties, except more so, in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

What 'multiculturalism' boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture - and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.

I'm talking like 10, 12 years old. Either junior brings Mom and Pop or Mom and Pop bring the kids. I'm talking young here, not a college drinking crowd.

To be honest with you, I'm not sure what a pop tune is. I'm sure if I hear it on the radio, I'd say that's pop or this or that. But, really, what I pay attention to the most is just music that moves me. It's all at least a root-type music instead of a formula.

In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.

When I moved from Canada to Korea, I experienced a massive culture shock. I wasn't familiar with Korean culture at all and was very surprised at the hierarchical elements of Korean culture. However, at the time I was determined to succeed so I became a sponge and just soaked in everything I could.

I play Sun-Hi, a Korean-American girl who is a social media expert and dreams of becoming a worldwide star. Being on Make It Pop is so much fun because we get to sing dance and act all in one production which is a dream come true! Working with the cast and crew is also a blast!

Avoiding the appearance of queenly behavior is politically wise. But it does American culture no favors if a first lady tries so hard to be average that she winds up looking common.

In political sense, it doesn't really matter what I do on my own, but it's so important to rally some sort of collectiveness and reignite a collective vision, and I think that's something you can do effectively through art and music, and through writing and entertainment - and just through like, pop culture. It's about spreading ideas and making people think differently, essentially.

I feel like I'm a designer, not a pop star. But if certain people think of me like a pop star, then the only thing I could do about this is dye my hair black and cut it short maybe.

I know is that the response [for Difficult People ] has been really great. I think it's for smart people. I think it's for people who obviously care about pop culture or know about it, even if it's to a fault. I think it's for outsiders.

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a "permission culture" -- a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.

For me it's the high-water mark of American culture - not so much contemporary jazz, which has become kind of academic, but the jazz from the '20s on through the '70s.

I think there have been so many documentaries about pop stars, made by pop stars. It's a new phenomenon. People making these movies where they praise themselves and show their own weaknesses. it's all designed to make you love them even more.

When I was old enough to know better, I ate a bar of soap in the shape of the Muppets' Fozzie Bear, because I loved him so much I wanted to consume him, even if doing so made me ill. I didn't yet know the word 'foreshadowing.' Fozzie was the only first of many pop-culture icons I feel shaped by.

When I left teaching, I don't think anyone I worked with necessarily understood what I did or the level at which I did it but I think they all do now. I think its Bullet Club stuff and what we're doing now in wrestling is, honestly, such a big part of pop culture that it's kind of hard to avoid, even if you don't follow wrestling.

I've always had an ear for melodies, and they veer pop. My lyrics are more country - what I love is the storytelling and the structure, how tight the rhymes can be. But pop melodies have always been intrinsically linked to my writing style.

I think people who just know me from my band think I don't like pop music. The truth is I love pop music.

The pop market is a very fickle market, and that's why for me to go into the teeny-pop, 'TRL' mode, it's not really for me.

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.'

While America is generally a violent place, no culture in this country glorifies violence more than the African-American community. And consequently, no other racial group is as disproportionately affected by it.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable, artless ingenue.

In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.

No one wants the picture-perfect song anymore. I'm trying to keep the beautiful qualities of pop - nostalgia, melodies, and the feeling that a beautiful pop song can give you - but make it real. It's not polished.

We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.

Most of the pop videos I've seen that have any male/female interaction are usually centered around a romance - and that's great, I am all for romance. But let's face it, there are a lot of other sexualities and identities that are well-deserving of some shiny pop video love.

[T]he Super Bowl, the quintessential American creation. A dizzying mélange of brilliant entrepreneurship in an atmosphere of intense competition. It is the perfect show for the most intensely competitive culture in this solar system.

In using the English language to create an entirely new art form, the pioneers of Hip Hop created a vessel that grew to impact nearly every facet of American culture.

I had the French culture at school and I love this culture but I also had another culture at home - that of Senegal. I think this way of growing up has made me the person I am today - because I had the two cultures.

Both cinematic culture and the culture at large have changed profoundly. We're now in post-cinematic digital culture, and the internet has obviously usurped movies, which are no longer central to our lives, at least not as a collective spectator experience.

I've always argued that all Tame Impala melodies are pure pop. It's just that 'Lonerism,' for example, is a completely rumbling, fuzzed out psychedelic rock album. But for me, it was just pop music produced the way that I like to produce it.

I walk around and think about things. When I come across a thought that makes me laugh, I write it down. Then, at night, I say the thought to people through a microphone. I don't think about politics or pop culture very much, so those thoughts don't often make it to the microphone.

American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.

This notion that Americans have. . . that they don't have to do anything other than be American in order to lead - that's very pervasive in the culture, it goes very deep into how they see themselves here.