90s Music Feminism Riotgrrrl Quotes

[H]e asked Renee, "What does rock and roll have today that it didn't have in the sixties?" Renee said, "Tits," which in retrospect strikes me as not a bad one-word off-the-dome answer at all. The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl
that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way
hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do. ~ Rob Sheffield

I love all those great 'f' words - feminism, folk music.. ~ Ani DiFranco

I spent most of the 90s trying to make it as a producer - which is a difficult game to get into at the best of times, let alone pre internet - and then I got married, had three boys and we moved house. I had to sell a lot of my gear, so a lot of the original set up went. I was busy being a dad and working, but still loved music. ~ Ekoplekz

A lot of R&B cats are doing a lot of auto-tune. Tyrese went back to the basics. I love classic soul music and Ginuwine. Ginuwine and Usher laid the foundation back in the '90s. There's no one doing that anymore. ~ Leon Bridges

When I started to make music at the end of the '90s, I saw myself highly influenced by hip-hop and techno, but I wanted to apply these ideas to something from the local sound; something that had identity, that would say who we were and where we came from. ~ Steven Sater

In the late '80s and early '90s, there was a slightly retro drum sound that was popular in hip-hop music called the 808 bass drum sound. It was the bass drum sound on the 808 drum machine, and it's very deep and very resonant, and was used as the backbone as a lot of classic hip-hop tracks. ~ Steve Albini

I have a lot of friends who are in love the '90s. Girls, boys. '90s music? That's Tupac. That's Biggie. That's TLC. That's Aaliyah. I still listen to Aaliyah. I still listen to Tupac and Biggie. There's people who are really heavy on that culture. ~ Shameik Moore

That era in the late '80s through the '90s was really when the music was so new, fresh, energetic, but still creative. It hadn't quite gotten corporatized yet. ~ Terry Gross

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships. ~ Mayer Hawthorne

I don't think '90s music was as significant as '60s music in terms of changing the world, but it was significant, and I think it was similarly disillusioning when you realize the mainstream just ~ Billy Corgan

At the end of the '90s and into 2000, electronic music was still an underground phenomenon, especially in America. ~ Tiesto

Survival and persistence, sung defiantly in the high notes of the diva, are no small feats in a world that wishes fervently for one's nonexistence and/or silent complicity in one's own exploitation. The narcissistic self-regard implied in the negative definition of the diva is a radical insistence on self-love when no one else loves you, when you are not, according to social norms, worthy of being loved at all, but only of being desired in a way that uses you up or consumes you. To say that diva citizenship cannot change the world is to accept a meaning of "the world" that aligns it only with the privileged. An investigation of the real function of diva citizenship has to start by asking who these acts are for, and whether the very fact of having something for herself can change a person, who might then go on to change the world just by surviving in it for one more day. ~ Amy Gentry

I've never really been a traditional country kind of guy. I wanted my music to sound more like the end of the '90s and to have the kind of great music, pop or whatever, that radio will embrace. ~ Bryan White

I really love the '90s. I love the music from then for sure, and to go back to New York then would be a really wonderful thing. ~ Imogen Poots

Music was segregated in the '80s, and then in the '90s the boundaries started to break down, and rock kids got into electronic music. But then you got this reverse snobbery where people would only listen to electronic music and not rock. ~ Thomas Bangalter

I can play the flute. Music was my favourite A-level, and I used to love composing my and stylising my voice to sound like 90's singing sensation Tori Amos. ~ Erin O'Connor

Ani DiFranco or Ani, as she is universally know to her fans, was, to a certain kind of white, middle-class woman, girl power in the purest sense. At twenty, she founded her own record label, Righteous Babe. She's released dozens of albums (and has sold over four million copies), had a baby, documented her life on the road, and opened for Bob Dylan. ~ Marisa Meltzer

The industrial thing came about mainly through giving up trying to write pop songs in the early '90s. I don't think I was ever very good at pop music and as soon as I stopped trying, and started to write more the things I loved, it became much heavier and more aggressive. ~ Gary Numan

I didn't get into music until the early 90s when I heard rap music for the first time. ~ Gonjasufi

All the big pop acts that I've been into over the years - whether it's ABBA or Prince - managed to combine amazing melodies and honest human emotion. But coming out of the super-super-commerical pop industry in the 90s, maybe people forgot about the fact that pop music can do both of those things. ~ Robyn

I grew up listening to 1980s country music, mostly. Early '90s. That time period was my favorite. ~ Blake Shelton

Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples. ~ M.I.A.

There is a storytelling element in there. The tango form is a little like the blues in that you have a kind of structure. It's not as rigid as twelve bar, but it's very much a storytelling medium -- and there's an element of call-and-response, and a particular arc in the musical form, that suggest a story. It's about being in the moment, with the music; and responding to your partner, and the particular feeling and momentum in her body in any one moment. It's a very concentrated thing; you can't think about anything else while you are doing it. If you try to hold a conversation, it just kind of falls apart. The music was what really drew me into tango. Everyone knows a few of the more popular tango classics, but once you get into it, there's such a rich field. It's astonishing, this kind of miraculous musical form that developed in a very small locality: two cities on either side of the River Plate, in Argentina and Urugauy. It started in the 1880s or '90s, and there are all kinds of mysteries, myths and stories, about how tango started and developed. It was first of all considered really low-life, almost reptilian. Something to be avoided and not talked about. And then it became this word wide phenomena. . .and I could go on talking about tango forever. . . . but its also to do with movement. I try to get that into my pictures: a sense of movement, something flowing through. A while ago, I realised how much I'd been drawing dancing figures in the corners of my sketchbooks fo ~ Alan Lee (artist)

My mom was a folk singer and Celtic harpist. My dad was in a barbershop quartet and my great grandma was an opera singer. As I grew up, I discovered pop music and Top 40 radio, but it was in the '90s, so music was very different then - it was really lyrical. ~ Skylar Grey

In the '90s, the radio was still alive with all different kinds of points of view, and I think that's why people are longing for that time. It was the first time that alternative music broke through to the mainstream. ~ Shirley Manson

When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late '70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, "What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?", and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned. Former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, for example, or former Yes keyboardist Trevor Horn, continued to produce vital, influential music through the '80s and '90s. Ian Anderson has continued to lead Jethro Tull out of the '60s and '70s and quietly through the decades, making high quality music and finding a large enough audience to continue recording and touring worldwide. ~ Neil Peart

I started listening to and playing other music in the '90s. It was after hearing other bands, like Bad Religion, cover Ramones songs that I started to like our songs again. ~ Dee Dee Ramone

The music industry doesn't exist the way it used to. You'll never have another star like the stars of the '90s. ~ Mika.

I grew up listening to Tupac, Biggie and other hip hop artists in the 90s. To this day, their music is still some of my favorite. ~ Michael Isabella

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music. ~ Jessica Pare

When I'm dating someone, I have a list called my 'Oh No Nos.' If a woman commits a Oh No No, it can end the relationship. Not loving '90s R&B music is #3 on the Oh No Nos list. Girl don't
even know who Ginuwine is. ~ Aziz Ansari

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel. ~ Jen Lancaster

I think my style is quite grungy and punky. I love the '90s and the music from that time, and I love punk music. I'm also a fan of mixing vintage with some high fashion, which links back to my musical taste because I tend to mix old music with newer songs. ~ Chelsea Leyland

I love everything from country to alternative to Blink-182 and '90s music to Dave Matthews. ~ Spencer Boldman

My hope for the future, not just in the music industry, but in every young girl I meet ... is that they all realize their worth and ask for it. ~ Taylor Swift

I was fortunate enough to hook up with Quincy Jones and had a lot of success. But the music of the '80s really changed when the '90s hit. For me to chase that dream or career of music, I started a family, started on 'Melrose Place,' so it was something I didn't have the time or energy. ~ Jack Wagner

I'm glad about what's happening to the music business. This last crop of people we had in the 90s, who are going away now, they didn't like music. They didn't trust musicians. They wanted something else from it. ~ James Taylor

The hip-hop that I really connected with was Public Enemy, KRS-One, Ice Cube, and N.W.A. That late '80s and early '90s era. The beginning of gangster rap and the beginning of politically conscious rap. I had a very immature, adolescent feeling of, "Wow, I can really connect with these people through the stories they're telling in this music." ~ Jess Row

Since I loved underground music, I tried to carve a space for feminism within it. Those were my hopes. ~ Kathleen Hanna

Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's. ~ Nina Blackwood

Lads, I forgot to tell you. Naya don't like good music because she's a feminist.'
'What's a feminist?' Tyse asks.
'It's like a chick who blames all of her mental problems on dudes,' Jimmy explains. 'But not even on specific dudes, just, like, the idea of dudes. It's fucked up. And it's ironic, cos feminists usually look like dudes themselves.'
'But Naya doesn't look like a dude.'
'Aww, thanks Tyse,' Naya says. 'James has given you a horribly inaccurate definition of a feminist, but he has ably demonstrated why we exist. Unfortunately, he's not the only entitled male with no respect for women. ~ Brendan Lawley

I don't get into the favorite songs thing, because so many speak to different parts of my life, but the music in the '90s is just unbeatable. ~ Brandy Norwood

...While many who have debated the image of female sexuality have put "explicit" and "self-objectifying" on one side and "respectable" and "covered-up" on the other, I find this a flawed means of categorization. [...] There is a creative possibility for liberatory explicitness because it may expand the confines of what women are allowed to say and do. We just need to refer to the history of blues music - one full of raunchy, irreverent, and transgressive women artists - for examples. Yet the overwhelming prevalence of the Madonna/whore dichotomy in American culture means that any woman who uses explicit language or images in her creative expression is in danger of being symbolically cast into the role of whore regardless of what liberatory intentions she may have. ~ Imani Perry

Nothing is going to stay the same; nothing's gonna sound like in 1952. There's some stuff that has some elements of back in the day, like back in the 90's, back in the 80's or whatever. Some elements, but it's not going to be the same, exactly, sounding. And I love it, I've seen the music change. I've seen the flow and the energy go from turned up to turned down to back to turned up. I like to try different stuff. I don't like to do the same old thing over and over again. I don't like to be repetitive, that gets on my nerves. ~ Juicy J

Country music in the mid-'90s was a big influence on my career, and I played all the songs that are referenced in '94' back in my club days. Joe Diffie was rocking a sick mullet, and he was hotter than ever ... just putting out monster hit after monster hit. It totally takes me back to those days, and it makes me smile every time I hear it. ~ Jason Aldean

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle. ~ John Darnielle

I don't find imitating other people's music easy at all. I remember being fifth in line for a Rolling Stones tour, early '90s, when Bill Wyman left, and I was hoping against hope that I wouldn't get the call to audition. I wouldn't be able to play a Stones song if you put a gun to my head. ~ Peter Hook

I'd saw there were millions like me, but there aren't, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don't read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. ~ Nick Hornby

We have tons of live performances that we're putting on there. We have music videos. There's a music video for the song called I Am Jesus what is one of the funniest music videos, like we just could not find a place for it in the movie, but it's like crazy funny. And we have the whole video. ~ Nicholas Stoller

Jazz Improvisation means that practice is not as straightforward as it would be when you simply have a score to play. ~ Ahmad Jamal