Music Generations Quotes

I have a lot faith in the younger generation of music lovers. Youth isn't living in the past; if somebody tells them that there's something better than what they have, they're going to check it out. And if they like it, they're going to get it. I'm not worried about the youth. Young people aren't just looking back, they are also looking forward. ~ Neil Young

I love his music because he was my generation. But then again, Elvis is everyone's generation, and he always will be. ~ Margaret Thatcher

The kids I talk to are convinced their generation will make the best music. And the greatest artists have yet to be discovered. I walk around with that thought every day. ~ L.A. Reid

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations. ~ Carl Jung

I don't want this music to die.The older people are passing it on to the younger generation so the younger generation can pass it on to the next generation. ~ Vy Higginsen

Generation after generation can't just be loaded with more and more nuclear weapons and not ultimately dance to that music. ~ Marianne Williamson

It is interesting seeing young people these days and watching how unimportant music is in their lives compared with our generation. ~ Alison Moyet

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The people who carried the Catholic faith forward in history, who made the culture of beauty, music, art, and architecture rooted in the Christian understanding of God and humanity - these generations were taught, spiritually fed, and shaped by priests exactly like the men who minister to us in our local Church, men not so different from the one who wrote this book. ~ Paul Scalia

The ethic of ecstasy is the opposite of the trial's ethic; under its protection everybody does whatever he wants: now anyone can suck his thumb as he likes, from infancy to graduation, and it is a freedom no one will be willing to give up; look around you on the Metro; seated or standing, every single person has a finger in some orifice of his face-in the ear, in the mouth, in the nose; no one feels he's being observed, and everyone dreams of writing a book to tell about his unique and inimitable self, which is picking its nose; no one listens to anyone else, everyone writes, and each of them writes the way rock is danced to: alone, for himself, focused on himself yet making the same motions as all the others. In this situation of uniform egocentricity, the sense of guilt does not play the role it once did; the tribunals still operate, but they are fascinated exclusively by the past; they see only the core of the century; they see only the generations that are old or dead. ~ Milan Kundera

Being Irish and a citizen of the world, has made me truly appreciate Irish culture, music and history. Whether you're first, second generation Irish or even with no connection to Ireland, you should visit in 2013 for a unique experience. ~ Liam Neeson

Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges? ~ Mark Helprin

I know, for me, you know, my generation - I never would have known anything about Robert Preston's performance in 'The Music Man' if there hadn't been a film where he played the part. I just heard how great he was on Broadway way before my time. ~ John Lloyd Young

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation. ~ Henry Steele Commager

Maybe it's because I grew up during the MTV generation, but to me a perfect song is one I can imagine a music video to, a song that can take you into a dream. ~ Dan Chaon

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated - indeed, feverishly nurtured - by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo. ~ Scott Anderson

We live in a generation of not being in love, and not being together. But we sure make it feel like we're together, because we're scared of seeing each other with somebody else. ~ Drake

I always want to do music that inspires or influences another generation. You want what you create to live, be it sculpture or painting or music. Like Michelangelo, he said, I know the creator will go, but his work survives. That is why to escape death, I attempt to bind my soul to my work. ~ Michael Jackson

The Protocol. Silence. A choice made generations ago to wipe out violence, but that had also succeeded in wiping out joy, laughter, and love. It had made the Psy an emotionless, robotic race that excelled in business and technology but produced no forms of art, no great music, no works of literature. ~ Nalini Singh

I was part of punk's second generation, so, not the first wave of '70s punk, but the American hardcore scene. I had a really strong love for music prior to that, but punk created a new template. ~ Bucky Pope

I always wanted to do music that influences and inspires each generation. ~ Michael Jackson

Now that the generation that grew up on '80s indie-rock has attained influential positions in the culture, that music is the new yardstick. And that will shift yet again some day. ~ Michael Azerrad

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience. ~ Carlisle Floyd

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon‐falls, the mackerel‐crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect. ~ W.B. Yeats

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.
They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore. ~ Ravi Zacharias

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything. ~ Renzo Rosso

A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive? ~ Itay Talgam

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Part of me also knows that this generation is the least racist and most pro-gay, so that's great. But they have a real lack of gravitas. And they have no taste in music. Vampire Weekend? Can we play some music, please? Can we rock out for a minute? Where's your Metallica? ~ Greg Behrendt

John Lennon was a musical genius. All I have to do is think of some of his songs and even the titles make me feel good ... and I'm not the only one. His music has crossed cultures and even generations. ~ Ray Comfort

Kids don't care about rock and roll as much as they used to, as the other generations have. It's already turned into nothing but a fashion statement and an identity for kids to use as a tool for them to fuck and have a social life. ~ Kurt Cobain

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes. ~ Bill Cosby

Music is not supposed to be nationalist. It is supposed to surpass language barriers. It is about generations communicating with each other. ~ Simon Le Bon

New generations have unprecedented power to make great changes. Take the music business for example. The new generations have toppled the music industry by file sharing, downloading, and Myspace. Rock 'n' roll belongs to the people. ~ Patti Smith

I come from a generation that was surrounded by popular music, but I don't know if anybody's ever going to move the ball forward as far and as fast as the Beatles did. ~ Steven Soderbergh

The incomparable Michael Jackson has made a bigger impact on music than any other artist in the history of music. He was magic. He was what we all strive to be. He will always be the King of Pop! Life is not about how many breaths you take, but about how many moments in life that take your breath away. For anyone who has ever seen, felt or heard his art, we are all honored to have been alive in this generation to experience the magic of Michael Jackson. I love you, Michael. ~ Beyonce Knowles

Jazz is very much alive. Everywhere I go there's a new generation of musicians playing Jazz music. ~ Toots Thielemans

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than the birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won't forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in. ~ Linda Ronstadt

I think music influences fashion and has done so for generations. ~ Georgia Jagger

The belief that they were special, that they had the stones to endure what others couldn't, was the most quintessentially Texas thing about them. It was an arrogance born of genuine fortitude and a streak of hardheadness six generations deep, a Homeric shield against the petty jealousies and lethal injustices that so occupied white folks' free time, their oppressive and intrusive gaze into every aspect of black life - from what you eat to who you marry to the clothes you wear to the music you play to the way you wear your hair to how you address them on the street. The Mathews family recognized it for what it was: a fevered obsession that didn't really have anything to do with them, a preoccupation that weakened a man looking anywhere but at himself. ~ Attica Locke

Our interpretations through the years and generations have always changed, but the emotions, ideas, and the thoughts of the composers are still with us, and these are the premise of the music. The time factor has little to do with it because, after all, it is about human feeling, the Universe and who we are as people. ~ David Finckel

When I started Rolling Stone in November 1967, the magazine's initial chapter was to cover rock & roll music with intelligence and respect. Even then, we knew that the fervor sweeping our generation encompassed more than just music. ~ Jann Wenner

Every generation thinks their music is the ultimate. But there's great stuff from every generation. ~ Delbert McClinton

The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis. ~ Lola Kirke

When I left politics in the early Eighties and started writing and recording, my idea was that I could have an influence further down into other generations. That Natives could come into the culture through arts and music. ~ John Trudell

Let my style capture all the sounds of my time. This should make it an annoyance to my contemporaries. But later generations should hold it to their ears like a seashell in which there is the music of an ocean of mud. ~ Karl Kraus

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. ~ Jennifer Egan

Older generations can sometimes look down on today's hip hop but I refuse that mindset. I remember how hurt I was when older people told me that Run-D.M.C. was jungle music or that it was not music at all. Or that LL Cool J was not art. ~ Erik Parker

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries
television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values
love, care, service to others
handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America. ~ Cornel West

He looks at houses, chateaus, forests, and thinks about the countless generations who used to see those things and who are gone now; and he understands that everything he is seeing is oblivion; pure oblivion, the oblivion whose absolute state will soon be achieved, the moment he himself is gone. And again I think about the obvious idea (that astoundingly obvious idea) that everything that exists (nation, thought, music) can also not exist. ~ Milan Kundera

There's a lot of really inspiring music coming around the bend - we tend to believe that to sound classic or timeless is to sound vintage or retro. It's a little bit dangerous, because you'll really miss a chance to make your mark as a generation. ~ Brandi Carlile

The mythology in rock n' roll is that I'm a bit of a loose cannon. Yet I've produced more music than anybody in my generation. So how much of a loose cannon am I? But the general public believes that I'm a loose cannon, so let them believe it. I'm not going to correct them. ~ Billy Corgan

Confucius said, "When good government prevails in the empire, ceremonies, music, and punitive military expeditions proceed from the son of Heaven. When bad government prevails in the empire, ceremonies, music, and punitive military expeditions proceed from the princes. When these things proceed from the princes, as a rule, the cases will be few in which they do not lose their power in ten generations. When they proceed from the great officers of the princes, as a rule, the case will be few in which they do not lose their power in five generations. When the subsidiary ministers of the great officers hold in their grasp the orders of the state, as a rule the cases will be few in which they do not lose their power in three generations. When right principles prevail in the kingdom, government will not be in the hands of the great officers. When right principles prevail in the kingdom, there will be no discussions among the common people."
16-2 ~ Confucius

Trends in culture all serve a purpose and that's always indicative in fashion and music, you can always tell what's going on culturally in the mindset of the young generation if you look at those mediums. ~ Marina And The Diamonds

We come from a generation that wanted to make electronic music accepted, at a time [when] it was not. ~ Thomas Bangalter

I want kids of this generation to see that everything is cool, that there's some kind of unity in hip-hop. We all found something that's really important to us, and music is all we've really got. ~ Missy Elliott

There is a timelessness about sport. Like music and art, it is a quality that cuts across generations and nations. It provides a link between Australians of succeeding generations whether urging on a Donald Bradman or cheering and rejoicing in the America's Cup victory. Call it the spirit, the soul of sport - it will be in 2001 the same as it was in 1901. ~ Greg Hartung

The interesting thing about the Beatles was: The music was one thing, but we kind of symbolized a certain kind of freedom at a time when people of our generation were just growing up and just becoming adults. ~ Paul McCartney

We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard ... Everything was 10th-generation Led Zeppelin ... Overproduced, or just junk. We missed music like it used to be. ~ Joey Ramone

There's a jangle to the music of the dead. I mean that certain something that's so happy and so sad at the same time. The notes almost make a perfect harmony, but don't. Then they do but quickly crash into dissonance. They simmer in that sweet in-between rhythm section rattling along all the while. Chords collapse chaotically into one another and just when you think it's gonna spill into total nonsense, it stands back up and comes through sweet as a lullaby on your mami's lips. Songs that'll make people tap their feet and drink melancholically but not realize the twisting genius lurking within until generations later. ~ Daniel Jose Older

Music has always been in my family down to my dad through my uncle. I'm just the next generation, since it's always been around me when I was younger when I looked up to my mom and dad, to Michael Jackson, and B2K was my favorite band growing up. ~ Jacob Latimore

I'm not too embarrassed to say I'm the definition of the target audience. This is my generation, the one of exalting music in album form. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking. ~ Wynton Marsalis

The people playing on these songs are from Wisconsin and Illinois and Chicago and St. Louis and there's a certain attitude that comes across in the songs and the way that they're performed. I'm born and raised in the Midwest, and my family's been here for generations. This is where I'm from and how I think, and that's reflected in the music I make. ~ Pokey LaFarge

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. ~ Allan Bloom

Jonny Lang has the power to move the music into the next millennium by reaching the ears of a new generation. The great musicians have the power to break all of the 'isms'-race, age, sex, et cetera. Jonny Lang is one of those musicians. ~ Luther Allison

Right, different generations come along, and discover the music, I think. ~ Wanda Jackson

To ensure that future generations have the opportunity to make a living from the creation of music, it is critical that we continue to build support behind this important initiative. Thousands of people have already voiced their opinion that it is time to vigorously defend the rights of music creators. Our goal now is to empower thousands more to carry this message forward. ~ Keri Hilson

Our campaigns have always been based on what we consider music icons that transcend generations and they're not of the moment - they continue to evolve. ~ Paul Weller