Quotes About Music

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they're going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It's just a given law.

You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends.

I like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

Yeah, anybody can go in with two turntables and a microphone or a home studio sampler and a little cassette deck or whatever and make records in their bedrooms.

I don't listen to the radio very much, but that could be because I don't have a car.

I'm not suggesting people abandon musical instruments and start playing their cars and apartments, but I do think the reign of music as a commodity made only by professionals might be winding down.

There's more good music being made now than ever before.

It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

So there's no guarantee if you like the music you will empathize with the culture and the people who made it. It doesn't necessarily happen. I think it can, but it doesn't necessarily happen. Which is kind of a shame.

There's something about music that encourages people to want to know more about the person that made it, and where it was recorded, what year it was done, what they were listening to, and all this kind of stuff. There's something that invites all this obsessive behavior.

It didn't even occur to me that I'm the last person in the world who should play salsa or Brazilian music.

The making of music is profoundly affected by the market.

I found music to be the therapy of choice.

Musicians sort of knew this already—that the emotional center is not the technical center, that funky grooves are not square, and what sounds like a simple beat can either be sensuous or simply a metronomic timekeeper, depending on the player.

The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states, and they'd be avaliable to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace.

There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," said Purves. "That's the reason we like music. Music is far more complex than [the ratios of] Pythagoras. The reason doesn't have to do with mathematics, it has to do with biology.

The online music magazine Pitchfork once wrote that I would collaborate with anyone for a bag of Doritos.

You might say that the universe plays the blues.

Something about music urges us to engage with its larger context, beyond the piece of plastic it came on-it seems to be part of our genetic makeup that we can be so deeply moved by this art form. Music resonates in so many parts of the brain that we can't conceive of it being an isolated thing.

The classical players who think all popular music is simple tend not to hear the nuances involved, so naturally they can't play very well in that style. Simplicity is a kind of transparency in which subtle nuances can have outsize effects. When everything is visible and appears to be dumb, that's when the details take on larger meanings.

If they liked a tune, they wanted to hear it again—now! The vibe was more like CBGB than your typical contemporary opera house.

Johannes Kepler published his book Harmonices Mundi in 1619. In it he proposed that it was the Creator who "decorated" the whole world, using mathematical and musical harmonic proportions. The spiritual and the physical are united.

Presuming that there is such a thing as "progress" when it comes to music, and that music is "better" now than it used to be, is typical of the high self-regard of those who live in the present. It is a myth. Creativity doesn't "improve.

People probably heard a greater quantity of music, and a greater variety, on these devices than they would ever hear in person in their lifetimes.