My father used to sing to me in my mother's womb. I think I can name about any tune in two beats.
Music is how you feel.
I guess now music is so saturated and so microwaved. It's, like, 15 minutes in the microwave and boom, you've got something. Nobody's putting passion or any thought behind it anymore.
When you're trying to bring the streets into rap to prove a point, then you already lost. You separate the two, and that ain't to be played with. You've got people that lost their lives and people that are doing real time. If we gon' make music, let'...
I'm never scared what people are gonna think about music that I make.
Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.
I'm always gonna have the darker edgy music; it is always in my pocket because it comes so naturally to me.
I just want to make a classic. Classic is the standard. I'm just trying to make music that will last a lifetime.
American music culture is black culture.
I do so much music that it's like a fog, and I can't even remember all of it.
For real, some of my favorite music is Mexican. It's something about the bassline and the drumming. I can't even speak Spanish, but that's probably why I like it so much.
Music moves me - duh - and that is like having a window opening on a heightened reality, but the effect is fleeting: When the music ends, the magic, the uplifting, vanishes and the window slams shut. Words, on the other hand, by the nature of how the...
I can only think of music as something inherent in every human being - a birthright. Music coordinates mind, body and spirit.
Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous.
But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each othe...
The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, bu...
