I don't think I was ever particularly mean. I can certainly think of some idiotic exchanges I've had. I was accused of destroying pop music, like Wagner destroyed opera - a guy in Germany started ranting that at me.
Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'
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.
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 want to produce more number one hits but not follow trends blindly! What I really hope to achieve in the long-term is to get that cross-over status such as Calvin Harris and Avicii. I'd love to be a household name in 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 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.
I am a pop culture person. And car people have clearly contributed to pop culture, which is how I knew about purple French tail lights and 30-inch fins without exactly knowing what they were.
Being a musician has actually surrounded and immersed me in pop culture and youth culture from a very young age. But even before I was singing in bands and creating any kind of art, I was always fascinated by pop culture.
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.
I was part of the sort of avant guard tradition of John Cage and music concrete and pushing back the boundaries of avant garde classic pop rhythms. I think everyone brings something completely different to it.
'The Whale' was in the category of so-called serious music, and yet it brings together a wide series of musical styles. It was influenced by people such as The Beatles, the spirit of the times, and I think 'The Whale' certainly had a pop element to it.
From a young age I was really into pop music because I had these two older sisters who were into it, and I wanted to be like them. They liked Wham! and so I was really into them too.
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 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.
You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.
Pop music seems to be the way radio programming has chosen to support female artists. They have chosen not to support a more provocative voice from women, which I find disappointing.
People always say I write a lot of pop culture references. Can somebody please count the pop culture references in 'Firefly?' Because I don't know how to put this to you, but there was one. I referenced The Beatles in the pilot.
My music is music that Christians and Catholics can listen to. Muslims. Buddhists. And non-religious people as well. It's just music. You can look at the music in several different ways. It's music for everybody.
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.
It took me a while to get an electric guitar and a bass and amps and stuff. Playing the acoustic guitar was much easier and more affordable. But I was always listening to the radio and was interested in all the rock and pop music.
I felt that the elegance of pop music was that it was reflective: we were holding up a mirror to our audience and reflecting them philosophically and spiritually, rather than just reflecting society or something called 'rock and roll.'
Where I came from in the country, there was no place to hear pop music like Little Richard and people like that. Later, I heard James Brown, Otis Redding, The Drifters, The Four Aces, The Ink Spots.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
It gets quite difficult for me when I listen to pop music. I don't often understand the words, but when someone translates them to me, I think, 'What is this song representing? That women are just there to be treated like objects?'
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.'
I like adding little elements into the final mix. I'm more fond of the '70s glam than '80s. I have that style of vocals... there are a lot of pop artists who are using the glam vibe in their music. I'm part of that wave.
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.
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.
Pop music is great, but there's a lot of BS about the attitude of guys being super-gangster - that's why the whole thing is silly. It's making fun of itself. That self-awareness is why people enjoy it. It's refreshing.
I'm not a singer, a walking instrument like Aretha Franklin. When you get an Iggy Pop record, you don't get "Iggy Sings." I am also a style of music, an approach.
While writing 'The Orientalist,' I played a soundtrack that alternated between ragtime and Azeri mugams, Russian operas and German and Italian pop songs from the 1920s and 30s. When I finally finished, I gorged on all my music from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
As a producer, I'm trying to challenge myself to just make something that is of a professional quality - not necessarily pop music, but maybe in the sense that Nine Inch Nails is professional quality.
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.
It's rare when an artist's talent can touch an entire generation of people. It's even rarer when that same influence affects several generations. Elvis made an imprint on the world of pop music unequaled by any other single performer.
When I hear the same formula being used over and over, I get bored. Just as huge pop artists have taken inspiration from things that are happening at the moment, I do the same with my music.
I've written about a lot of different things, but the whole idea of writing for another character is unusual for pop music... Most of the repertory is love songs, and most of mine isn't. I don't know if that's a mental defect, or shyness, or what.
For more than 10 years, Daniel Snaith has been playing mad scientist with pop and psychedelic music. As Manitoba, and more recently as Caribou, he's pushed the genres' limits with electronics and studio trickery.
There was a point when dancing to music became cheesy after the boy band era of NSync and Backstreet Boys, but there were always those who craved that kind of visual satisfaction. K-Pop really filled that void, because it's so geared to spectacle.
Things like rebellion and resistance to authority are absolutely as much a part of the human experience as love and cars are, and it's a part that doesn't get covered very much in pop music.
I'm trying to make pop records for the middle-class, lower-middle-class - pop for the 99 percent.
Pop music is actually a challenging genre. Not only do you have to be artistically expressive, but you also have to do that in a very strict format. I've always liked that challenge, but it's very easy to slip into something non-creative. You just have to stay inspired all the time.
We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular - popular culture.
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.
I admire Chris Martin. Coldplay have made some wonderful records for the genre they're involved in, but I would consider them to be more of a pop act. The music is much more cerebral than it is animalistic.
I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'
I was in bands all through my youth. Things started out more acoustic and then piano ballads. Then R&B followed by sappy pop music and then rock, punk and heavy metal.
And I have a dream of a New American Language, one with a little bit more Spanish. I have a dream of a new pop music, that tells the truth with a good beat and some nice harmonies.
The child stars who emerged from Disney boot camp and dominated pop culture in the late '90s and '00s are not only still around but also have spawned successors who have proven even more indispensable to the business of music, movies, and television.
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.
For me, music always leads. Lyrics are only about how they sing. It is wonderful if they read well, too. In the very best scenario, sometimes a lyric will pop out with a melody, simultaneously. That's a lovely thing, but you can't rely on that.
Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.
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.
Pop music, across its countless iterations, is a vast, amazing, thrilling art form. All life is in it. It stands for itself. The same is true of literature, but nobody feels compelled to toss Philip Roth a grammy just to prove it.
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.
Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.
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.
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'm interested in bridging and filling in space that hasn't already been filled, so when it comes to making music, I've just always wanted to be able to reference things that producers in the big pop major label context do, without compromising the entire sound of the record.
I like to think that I listen to Classic FM while domestic goddessing and, truth be told, I often do, but you know sometimes classical music can get a bit hectic and I just want to turn all the violins right down. That's when I pop the telly on.
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