Urban Music Quotes

I think everybody don't know what color I am.

It's like, "He's not black enough. He's not white enough. He's got a Latin last name but he doesn't have - he doesn't speak Spanish. Who are we selling this to? Are you making urban music? Are you making pop music? What kind of music are you making?"

I'm influenced by the music of the '60s.

It's a mishmash of everything. To me, psychedelic can be all the way to a DJ. House music can be very psychedelic. 'Flying Lotus' is very psychedelic. Even though it's urban and technological, it's also mind-expanding, anything-can-go mishmash.

Part of my affinity with urban music comes from being on 'Kids Incorporated,' 'cos we used to sit around and listen to Chaka Khan and Prince, and I got influenced by all that. Then gangsta rap got started, and I was infatuated with that - maybe that's why I'm fascinated by guns.

So that I saw music as a way of documenting realities from the urban cities of Latin America.

I really didn't try to make an effort to make urban music, but I am a product of my inspirations.

I'm a kid from New York, so urban life reflected into art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.

In North America, hip-hop and urban music are much more developed than it could be in Europe, except for a couple of markets like France, for example, or Germany, they're a little bit more aware.

I'm not going to do anything crazy, but I want to do music that I'm passionate about. I'm finally at an age where I can do the music that I grew up loving, which was urban pop, '90s music. I grew up listening to the divas, so I'm very happy to finally do urban pop. I hope that it's received well, and it has been so far.

I'm 13 to 17, 18 years old; I thought that's what the world was like. It never occurred to me that this was a very unusual period in music history. So I went on assuming that one day I'm going to have my band like my heroes had their own band. So people ask me this question all the time - they go, "Bass is basically a background instrument." The other thing is that in urban music, Black music, the bass has a much higher profile.

I think of my life as divided between a lot of different periods.

I grew up in the country, but as I got older I became more of an urban person. That's really when I started to become more of a creative person who was interested in fine arts, painting, drawing, and music. I studied jazz for a long time. Looking back, all those things were great training.

What is missing in a lot of urban music is perspective.

You hear a lot of regurgitated perspective. It's a lot of: out at the club. Had drinks. Patrón. Big booties. It's this regurgitated idea of living in this, I don't know, one-night-stand moment that always starts at the club and Patrón. And so perspective, perspective, perspective is what I'm an advocate of.

What I did was go into the studio and make music that I love.

Make music that when you hear it, it feels good. Whether it was urban inspired, dance inspired, HipHop inspired or it just feels good period.

Every place has its own challenges. In Canada, we have blessings like grants, but we also have curses in the sense that when you start to do more urban classified music, we no longer have a single urban radio station left.

I am very determined when it comes to my music, and I grew up just loving those singers who had that urban sort of feeling. So when it came down to making my record, I wanted to have that as well. ForeFront was really good about letting me go in that direction and then of course adding the more pop sounds. I feel very fortunate that I got to explore some unique and creative angles musically.

When I first put out music, people didn't know what I looked like.

They called it a new type of something, they couldn't put a genre on it - it was where indie and urban kind of meet in the middle. I thought that was quite exciting.

As the book writer for one big smash and one big smelly flop, I always wondered if anyone knows just what goes into making a great musical. When a show is a hit, the critics trip over themselves not knowing who to laud and applaud the loudest. It's that marvelous score, those urbane lyrics, that irreplaceable star. But only when a show is a flop, does anyone notice the book writer. And then it's always our fault.

In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one.

I'm a producer first, and I know music, so I can jump on any song, whether it's pop or urban, without changing me. Whatever I do, I'm gonna make it classic.

The Urban Literate Southern California Sub-Group of the Early Atomic Period has not yet produced a distinct body of folk music of its own.

Dizzee's just my childhood hero. He's definitely the inspiration. He's got himself to a very good place. He's defied the expectations of what British black urban music was like. He was the first person who made the rest of Britain realise it wasn't just a one-album-type situation. You've got to take your hat off to somebody like that.

I have a very pop voice, but there's so much of me I associate mostly with urban music, so I try to blend the two.

I don't like the word 'urban' because I think it's a bit of a generalisation and they use it to class music, but I don't think it's a word that necessarily classes music.

Canada can be tough for urban music.

One of the things that sells music is when the artist is looked at as someone who's come up from the streets. Not just any streets, but the toughest, meanest streets of the urban ghetto. And that's called 'street credibility'.