Architecture?
If you (look) at the Sex Pistols as a kind of archetypal punk band, it's not that d ifferent from Black Sabbath. It's rhythmically unsophisticated. It's really on-the-beat rock drumming. Same with the guitar--plug it in and turn it up to full distortion. The main difference is that you don't really have so much in the way of guitar solos, the singing tends to be more of a shouty-screamy kind of nature, rather than tune-orientated.
--Andy Gill, Gang of Four
Theirs [the Beatles] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resource-less brand of harmonic primitivism. In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent amateurishness of the musical material, though closely rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method. ("Strawberry Fields (Forever)" suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.)
--Glenn Gould
The way that they're going in the next millennium, they're on alien technology. We are becoming galactic humans. Hopefully, I think that hip-hop and electronic music will start traveling to other planets. From watching the Learning Channel and hearing all the scientists, they ARE ready. The technology is there. They have some major stuff that's already made and some of the technology had been made since the '60s, with Star Trek and The Jetsons.
--Afrika Bambaataa
The best kind of crazy is when you know it. When you are crazy and don't suspect it, you are in trouble. When you are crazy and you tell someone about it, you are in trouble, but you have the option of going sane if you can get the right kind of help. People who are crazy and don't know it are just eccentric. People who are crazy and dwell on the fact need help.
--Tom T. Hall
Let's face it, if you can hear a song on the radio, that is going to influence you to buy that record much more than anything you read. Especially since most people don't read now anyway.
--Lester Bangs on the power of music criticism
I would rather play ÒChiquita BananaÓ and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve. --Xavier Cugat
[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art. --Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home
Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living.
--Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer
I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.
--Niccols Paganini
What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
--Nathaniel Hawthorne
If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation.
--Oscar Wilde