Quotes About Music

If I do five, six records that sound great, I want it to come out as fast as it can. I don't care how many copies it sells. It's about musically moving the needle.

Needless to say, I like to create a unique sound for each project I do.

Needless to say, when I work on a film, it's mostly just me alone in my room just waiting to present the music to the director - and either he likes it or not.

A scene gets cut a few frames here and there, but there's a cumulative effect to it, and then the music needs to be reworked. It's demanding, but when you see the improved cuts, it's always better.

I want to set up a music school for the needy who cannot afford musical education so that they can realize their dreams.

I can't stay mad very long. I get grumpy when I read a bad review. I say, 'How could he say that about my music?' Then I forget about it. If I got mad every time somebody wrote something negative about me, I'd be exploding all the time. I'd be burned out just from reading reviews.

'Billie Jean' was a negative dance song, and that was one of the best dance songs ever.

Everyone seems so excited by the fact that music is more accessible, people can find new artists more easily and it's cheaper, without focusing on the potential negatives, not least of which is that idiots can more easily listen to your favourite music.

If you listen to most of my songs, the lyrics are pretty kind of dark, but I like to put it behind happy music because then it evens it out... I'm really happy, actually. Obviously I have my bad moments, but I always challenge myself to not put negativity out there because there's already enough.

Let's face it - negativity sells records.

I love that music will bring people together, because the world is full of negativity.

When I used to sit in the office with Jay Z and L.A. Reid... we would negotiate back and forth and discuss music. You're sitting in front of someone for hours. It's all about being passionate. Everything begins with yourself.

I'm a fan of Jay-Z, from the negotiating table to the booth.

My childhood neighbor played piano, and he told me we'd get all the girls if I learned how to play-and I was probably in eighth grade, going into high school, so I said, 'Sign me up.'

You start learning English in fifth grade. I was 12. But even before then I was listening to American music. My neighbor was a really big hip-hop fan, so he taught me everything around hip-hop.

Growing up in the mid-to-late '90s in London, you start seeing the explosion of drum'n'bass and then the birth of U.K. garage and grime. I decided to focus a lot of my energies as an aspiring MC. It was a very natural way to express yourself as a kid from a certain kind of neighborhood.

I grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood. So going over to friends' houses for dinner, their parents listened to Al Green and Luther Ingram. It was something that hit me early on, the feeling that came across.

All the music that I play today, I actually heard either at home or in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the '40s and '50s.

If I can just play, it doesn't matter where we are... Japan, Australia, or here in the neighborhood.

I grew up right in the heart of Treme, so it was a real music neighborhood, and there was a bunch of bands like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band around.

I love kids. Every time I go around people neighborhood, they're like, 'Biz! Yo Gabba Gabba!' They want me to beatbox all the time for them.

In the neighborhood that I grew up in - in New York on Long Island - there were a lot of musicians. For some reason, that time in history in our town in New York, everybody played. So it was all around me.

I wanted to make music for my people that I grew up with in my neighborhood. That's kind of the long and the short of that whole 'Diary' album.

I was going to different neighborhoods around Brooklyn battling cats back in - this started in '82, so that's like eighth grade. Maybe 13, 14.