Black Music Quotes

The Righteous Brothers were purely rhythm and blues, black music. ~ Bill Medley

Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it's Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before dying. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am the greatest thing to happen to black music. ~ Thom Yorke

Anybody under the age of forty knows hip-hop, gospel and R&B pretty well, and it's all a part of what we consider to be 'black music.' There is a natural synergy between the three. ~ John Legend

In my music, my plays, my films, I want to carry always this central idea: to be African. ~ Paul Robeson

At the same time, I was listening to black music, and I began to think that the best musicians were receiving the worst treatment. The people who were doing the greatest work were despised as lower class, with no dignity accorded to what they did. ~ Henry Flynt

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King. ~ Jess Row

There was certainly, like, a rebellious, like, youthful rage in me. And there was also the fact of no getting away from fact that I am white, and you know, this is predominantly black music, you know. ~ Eminem

I had written a tune called 'Shake, Rattle and Roll,' but the white stations refused to play it - they thought it was low-class black music. We thought what we needed was a new name. But a white disc jockey named Alan Freed laid on it, and he thought up the name 'rock n' roll.' ~ Jesse Stone

I never thought I was playing black music. I was just playing music, the stuff I liked. I sang blues at parties and things when I was a kid. ~ Mose Allison

Though I'm not the first king of controversy, I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley. To do black music so selfishly, and use it to get myself wealthy. ~ Eminem

Kansas City, I would say, did more for jazz music, black music, than any other influence at all. Almost all their joints that they had there, they used black bands. Most musicians who amounted to anything, they would flock to Kansas City because that's the place where jobs were plentiful. ~ Jesse Stone

Bob Marley performed the 'One Love Peace' concert in Jamaica with the two different warring political sides. There's always been that in black music and culture in general. It's no surprise because black music is such a reflection of what's going on in black life. It's not unusual for hip-hop. ~ Mos Def

There is not enough faith in black music at a high level. ~ Estelle

I want to burn as a beacon of possibility. I don't want nobody to misconstrue the commercial success I've had as anything other than an example of what black music is capable of. And what it's capable of is being more than just black. I'm not black or white anymore. I'm Cee Lo Green. ~ CeeLo Green

I don't do 'black music,' I don't do 'white music' ... I make fight music, for high school kids. ~ Eminem

It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.' ~ Joe Haldeman

White people couldn't do black music back in the day because they weren't funky or bad enough. They weren't from the ghettoes, but hip-hop and R&B changed all of that because white kids want to be down with it. They wanted to learn it so they studied the culture. It's kind of a cool thing because we shouldn't be so separate. ~ Narada Michael Walden

One motivation for the 'Soul Train' awards was the grumbling that all of us in the industry have heard about the way black music tends to be viewed as a secondary phenomenon by the other awards shows. ~ Don Cornelius

Black music has always known, and not been afraid to acknowledge just how high the stakes of Black thought are. To summarize the final soliloquy of Clay, the protagonist in LeRoi Jones' (aka Amiri Baraka's) play Dutchman. You'd better be glad Charlie Parker could play him some horn and Bessie Smith could sing, because if they didn't make music they might murder you. One would be hard pressed to find another group of people on this planet whose music is a surrogate for murder. One would be hard pressed to another group of people on this planet whose life is a proxy for death. ~ Frank B. Wilderson III

I think kids in Europe have developed a deeper knowledge of music and of black music in particular. You go to Europe, and these kids know about all this obscure funk and soul that kids over here wouldn't know. I think it's getting better in the States, though, with the age of the Internet. ~ Lenny Kravitz

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules. ~ Nick Hornby

Lights glittered and flashed in seizure-inducing display. Tables curved and undulated, the backlight making them seem darker than merely black. Music moved through the air with a physical presence, each beat a little concussion. Hasini, standing in a clot of steroid-enhanced bouncers and underdressed serving girls, caught Miller's eyes and nodded toward the back. ~ James S.A. Corey

Black music is too big and too powerful not to have its own awards show. ~ Don Cornelius

In 1965, when great young white artists in the English-speaking world were successfully re-channeling hillbilly and black music - you know Bob Dylan, Ray Davies, Pete Townsend, Keith Richards - they didn't get any money at first. They were all broke. ~ Iggy Pop

Black music has increased my enjoyment of what I do. It has increased my range, my ability to reach into myself and accept myself. ~ Michael Bolton

That's because we did not set out to make black music. We set out to make quality music that everyone could enjoy and listen to. ~ Smokey Robinson

The Beatles were huge. And the first thing they said when you interviewed them, 'Oh yeah, we grew up on Motown.'..They were the first white act to admit they grew up listening to black music. ~ Smokey Robinson

As would-be songwriters, our interest was in black music and black music only. We wanted to write songs for black voices. ~ Mike Stoller

Rock and roll came in and changed my life and changed the whole music scene forever, and then I grew to love R&B and Motown and all black music, gospel music. But I never dismiss any form of music. I listen to everything. ~ Elton John

I'd like to see more crossover between white and black music. That's something I've been advocating for years. ~ Daryl Hall

What I do isn't black music; it's just my music. ~ Daryl Hall

Half of the modern world goes back as far as Pearl Jam. The real historians go back to U2. But they need to go back further. They have to go back to the '50s and '60s, where things started. That's how you get to be your own personality, by studying the masters. Rock and roll was white kids trying to make black music and failing, gloriously! ~ Steven Van Zandt

I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don't know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something. ~ Dexter Gordon

A lot of my success comes from black music. It's something I'm very proud of. ~ Michael Bolton

Black music has become a commercial commodity. Live performances are not so accessible as they were previously. It use to be possible to go to the bar on the corner and hear music. It was available for a fifteen cent beer. ~ Archie Shepp

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today-jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock and roll, hip hop and on and on- is derived from the blues. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The library smells like old books - a thousand leather doorways into other worlds. I hear silence, like the mind of God. I feel a presence in the empty chair beside me. The librarian watches me suspiciously. But the library is a sacred place, and I sit with the patron saint of readers. Pulsing goddess light moves through me for one moment like a glimpse of eternity instantly forgotten. She is gone. I smell mold, I hear the clock ticking, I see an empty chair. Ask me now and I'll say this is just a place where you can't play music or eat. She's gone. The library sucks. ~ Laura Whitcomb

I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content. ~ Ken Burns

If you want music that speaks to you, that LISTENS to you, you have to go out of your way, which I enjoy actually. I'm constantly on a private-eye kick to find the totally obscure. ~ Trevor Dunn

The black man in North America was sickest of all politically. He let the white man divide him into such foolishness as considering himself a black 'Democrat,' a black 'Republican,' a black 'Conservative,' or a black 'Liberal' ... when a ten-million black vote bloc could be the deciding balance of power in American politics, because the white man's vote is almost always evenly divided. ~ Malcolm X

We must rebuild organic communities, where people can come together and have analogue conversations and share stories, art, music and emotions. ~ Bryant McGill

It's easy to say that reducing a song to 90 seconds on "American Idol" strips off so many things, and how it's the 21st century and music doesn't mean the same things to people and that it's so disposable. ~ Alan Light

Well before I was in a band, I wanted to be everything from a vet, an astronaut, an archeologist was a big one. It could be very wide-ranging because I had a lot of different interests including music so I'm very happy where I wound up. ~ Joan Jett

We all fall sometime, you're not the first. I know it hurts. In the end, you'll find what you deserve. ~ Alter Bridge

Melancholy, I repeated. I liked the way it sounded, like there was music hidden somewhere inside it. Kate Di Camillo, Because of Winn Dixie ~ Kate DiCamillo

The problem is, it's just not enough to live according to the rules. Sure, you manage to live according to the rules. Sometimes it's tight, extremely tight, but on the whole you manage it. Your tax papers are up to date. Your bills paid on time. You never go out without your identity card (and the special little wallet for your Visa!).
Yet you haven't any friends.
The rules are complex, multiform. There's the shopping that needs doing out of working hours, the automatic dispensers where money has to be got (and where you so often have to wait). Above all there are the different payments you must make to the organizations that run different aspects of your life. You can fall ill into the bargain, which involves costs, and more formalities.
Nevertheless, some free time remains. What's to be done? How do you use your
time? In dedicating yourself to helping people? But basically other people don't interest you. Listening to records? That used to be a solution, but as the years go by you have to say that music moves you less and less.
Taken in its widest sense, a spot of do-it-yourself can be a way out. But the fact is that nothing can halt the ever-increasing recurrence of those moments when your total isolation, the sensation of an all-consuming emptiness, the foreboding that your existence is nearing a painful and definitive end all combine to plunge you into a state of real suffering.
And yet you haven't always wanted to die.
You have had a l ~ Michel Houellebecq

And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In ~ Mat Johnson

When we turn,is there something shoved inside of us or is it more that something inside of us has been released? ~ Holly Black

The thing about this music is that if you just stand here and listen, you'll never appreciate it. You're supposed to be part of it - part of the party. I think that's why I like it so much. ~ Christina Lauren

When the tea is brought at five o'clock
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there. ~ Harold Monro

Our moments are music, and sometimes – just sometimes – we can catch them and put them into some lasting form. If we didn't have music, I don't think we could ever be truly happy, and if we didn't have special moments, we would never find music. ~ David Levithan

People just want to have access to all of the world's music. ~ Daniel Ek

His (Swami Vivekananda) words are great music, phrases in the style of Beethoven, stirring rhythms like the march of Handel choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his, scattered as they are through the pages of books, at thirty years' distance, without receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock. And what shocks, what transports, must have been produced when in burning words they issued from the lips of the hero! ~ Romain Rolland

The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers. ~ Anais Nin

Ig knew her, of course. It was the same woman who had served him and Merrin drinks on their last night together. Her face was framed by two wings of lank black hair that curled under her long, pointed chin, so she looked like the female version of the wizard who was always giving Harry Potter such a hard time in the movies. Professor Snail or something. Ig had been waiting to read the books with the children he and Merrin planned to have together. ~ Joe Hill

The money factor had been kind of my excuse as to why I hadn't put out any music. So I just found the cheapest way to make music and get it to people, and that was via the Internet. ~ Sam Hunt

If it has to be put in a box, it's a country record. But it's hard to do that, because it is inspired and influenced by the history of music in two different people's backgrounds. I think the focal point for many is the harmonies, and I think that is what is special and unique about it. ~ Jessica Harp

If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so. If this world is a vicious trap, so is its accuser, and the pot is calling the kettle black. ~ Alan W. Watts

When I think about singing, and music, I think about how the people who live on the East Tennessee side have more of a curve or yodel to their voices, and then you think about the curve of mountains. ~ Valerie June

What is life but a Spectrum and what is music but life itself. ~ Billy Cobham

Whenever I visit a city, I like to see what classical music concerts are on offer. ~ Park Chan-wook

She is not a musical girl nor, intrinsically, a joyful girl; but the music of the four Swedes shook something awake inside her, and when she heard it she felt airborne and strong. ~ Sonya Hartnett

I grew up loving classic rock music - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones - and then one day I heard 'Baby One More Time' on the radio and I thought 'What is this?' I was eight and it changed my life. ~ Sara Paxton

To my mind, there is a reason that music is there and it's about being human. ~ Kim Deal

The look that passes between Jeffrey and Kimber right then feels like it requires a swell of cheesy music in the background. Aw, I think. Baby brother's in love. I also find this kind of gross. ~ Cynthia Hand

Iain MacGregor," she whispered longingly, looking up. The woods were quiet. Strips of moonlight shone through tree limbs that reached like surreal black fingertips across her vision. A single tear slid down her cheek. She touched her mouth, imagining his kiss.
Taking a small pocket knife out of her cargo pants, she looked about. A mystic had once told her that if she left pieces of herself around while she lived, it would expand her haunting territory when she died. Jane wasn't sure she believed in sideshow magic tricks - or the Old Magick as the mystic had spelled it on her sign. She had no idea what had possessed her to talk to the palm reader and ask about ghosts. Still, just in case, she was leaving her stamp all over the woods.
She cut her palm and pressed it to a nearby tree under a branch. Holding the wound to the rough bark stung at first, but then it made her feel better. This forest wouldn't be a bad eternity.
The sound of running feet erupted behind her and she stiffened. No one ever came out here at night. She'd walked the woods hundreds of times. Her mind instantly went to the creepy girl ghosts chanting by the stream.
"Whoohoo!"
Jane whipped around, startled as a streak of naked flesh sprinted past her. The Scottish voice was met with loud cheers from those who followed him. "Water's this way, lads, or my name isn't Raibeart MacGregor, King of the Highlands!"
Another naked man dashed through the forest after him. "It smells of freed ~ Michelle M. Pillow

Every time he moved, with every breath he took, it seemed the man was carried along by iridescent orange and black wings.

She tried to convey how it was like travelling through the inside of a living body at times, the joints and folds of the earth, the liver-smooth flowstone, the helictites threading upward like synapses in search of a connection. She found it beautiful. Surely God would not have invented such a place as His spiritual gulag.

It took Ali's breath away. Sometimes, once men found out she was a nun, they would dare her in some way. What made Ike different was his abandon. He had a carelessness in his manner that was not reckless, but was full of risk. Winged. He was pursuing her, but not faster than she was pursuing him, and it made them like two ghosts circling.

She ran her fingers along his back, and the bone and the muscle and hadal ink and scar tissue and the callouses from his pack straps astonished her. This was the body of a slave.

Down from the Egypt, eye of the sun, in front of the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death.

Ali got one good look, then closed her eyes to the heat. ~ Jeff Long

It can be safely asserted that since early Colonial times, the North has had a distinct race problem. Every one of these States had slaves, and at the beginning of Washington's Administration, there were 40,000 black slaves and 17,000 black freemen in this section. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

In some instances, music is actually better than the spoken word, because it doesn't need to be understood. ~ Victor Wooten

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. ~ Romare Bearden

The night was so silent all around him.
Where he always stayed. In the silence.
Most days it still felt as if he were free falling toward a black future with nothing to hold onto. Where he'd land, he didn't know.
All he prayed for each night and every morning? To find when he landed - he wouldn't be alone. ~ Jennifer Kacey

The people at the label were great but at the end of the day our visions didn't match up and I knew I had to do it my way. The potential success that could come with signing with a major label didn't quite outweigh how important it was for me to make my music the way I knew it needed to be made. It was a hard decision to make, but I've never regretted it for a second and it's only become more clear to me after making and releasing Stairwells that it was the right one. ~ Kina Grannis

Music is the application of sounds to the canvas of silence. ~ Carl Jung

Although I don't use it nearly so much anymore, I've decided, five years down the line, that Mr. Treadstone's verdict on 'kind of' was kind of unjust. Obviously, this phrase can be redundant or reductive, or just plain stupid in some sentences, but not in all sentences. I wouldn't, for example, use a sentence like 'Antarctica is kind of cold', or 'Hitler was kind of evil'. But sometimes, things aren't black and white. And sometimes 'kind of' expresses this better than any other phrase. For example, when I tell you that my mother was kind of peculiar, I can think of no better way of putting this. ~ Gavin Extence

I like challenging myself. I like the challenge of rapping to fast beats, rapping to beats that are super slow, whatever. I like the challenges, so I'm not afraid to take on any piece of music and create a song to it if it feels right to me. ~ Will Ferrell

What's more, his faded old jeans hugged his ass perfectly as he stepped forward to toss a ring, and then they loosened as he stepped back. Hug, loosen, hug, loosen, hug, hug ... hug ... loosen. Jeans all perfectly rumpled right down to his dull, black boots. No doubt he chose those jeans specifically for their butt-hugging abilities. He probably practiced that hug-promoting movement in the mirror. ~ Carolyn Crane

Tell me!" Cecily insisted later, shaking Colby by both arms.
"Cut it out, you'll dismember me," Colby said, chuckling.
She let go of the artificial arm and wrapped both hands around the good one. "I want to know. Listen, this is my covert operation. You're just a stand-in!"
"I promised I wouldn't tell."
"You promised in Lakota. Tell me in English what you promised in Lakota."
He gave in. He did tell her, but not Leta, what was said, but only about the men coming to the reservation soon.
"We'll need the license plate number," she said. "It can be traced.
"Oh, of course," he said facetiously. "They'll certainly come here with their own license plate on the car so that everyone knows who they are!"
"Damn!"
He chuckled at her irritation. He was about to tell her about his alternative method when a big sport utility vehicle came flying down the dirt road and pulled up right in front of Leta's small house.
Tate Winthrop got out, wearing jeans and a buckskin jacket and sunglasses. His thick hair fell around his shoulders and down his back like a straight black silk curtain. Cecily stared at it with curious fascination. In all the years she'd known him, she'd very rarely seen his hair down.
"All you need is the war paint," Colby said in a resigned tone. He turned the uninjured cheek toward the newcomer. "Go ahead. I like matching scars."
Tate took off the dark glasses and looked from Cecily to Colby without smiling. "Holden ~ Diana Palmer