quotations about rock 'n' roll
DC, San Antone and the Liberty Town, Boston and Baton Rouge
Tulsa, Austin, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Francisco, too
Everywhere there's music, real live music, bands with a million styles
But It's still that some old rock and roll music
that really really drives 'em wild
HUEY LEWIS & THE NEWS
"The Heart of Rock and Roll", Sports
We built this city on rock 'n' roll.
STARSHIP
"We Built This City"
Rock 'n' Roll: The most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.
FRANK SINATRA
attributed, Frank Sinatra: The Man, the Music, the Legend
You know her life was saved by rock 'n' roll
Yeah rock 'n' roll
Ooh, Despite all the computations
You know you could just dance to the rock 'n' roll station
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND
"Rock and Roll"
As Rolling Stone formulated the ideal of the rock star on its covers--usually a man, preferably in some state of déshabillé, with the top button of his jeans undone--so its writing created the idea of what rock stars should offer their public: confession, preening self-regard, and blunt sexuality.
MICHAEL HANN
"The rise and fall of the rock star", Financial Times, October 20, 2017
The natural state of the rock star is to be, in the time-honoured phrase of the hardcore fan, "selling out". Once they play arenas instead of clubs, they've sold out. Once they sell their music for use in advertisements, they've sold out. Once they're pictured in the gossip pages hobnobbing with the social aristocrats, they've sold out. You can try to resist--The Strokes turned down $600,000 to license a song to a Heineken ad--but you're sucked in one way or the other. That's because being a rock star is a career, not a vocation, and it can't be sustained on artistry alone.
MICHAEL HANN
"The rise and fall of the rock star", Financial Times, October 20, 2017
Rock 'n' roll has always been a thing that has its most complete moments somewhere out on the margins, largely out of view. Take a bus ride with a band, and almost inevitably they'll start talking about their earliest tours. They'll remember the soundman's name from the club they hated but played a hundred times and, really, loved. They'll go back to a time before they were treated like something special.
WARREN ZANES
"Tom Petty Was Rock 'n' Roll's Ambassador to the World", Slate, October 3, 2017
Every performer who ever performed rock and roll or even close to it is lying if they tell you that they weren't influenced in some way or another by Elvis Presley. He turned the world around.
MAC DAVIS
attributed, e-leetspeak
It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it.
ROLLING STONES
"It's Only Rock'n'Roll (But I Like It)"
Glam rockers unquestionably used their performances of queer identities to provoke and rebel against the status quo in a way that roughly parallels earlier rockers' use of black music and identities. But there is also a crucial difference: whereas black music has always been central to the rock imaginary, queer identities were relegated to its periphery until glam came along.... Even though it is arguable that rock is equally steeped in a long tradition of masculine display that was often effeminate and implicitly queer, evocations of that tradition are not generally seen within rock culture as celebrations of rock authenticity.
PHILIP AUSLANDER
Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music
If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry.
JOHN LENNON
The Mike Douglas Show, 1972
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.
PATTI SMITH
Just Kids
Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards.
KEITH RICHARDS
attributed, Rock & Roll Facts, Figures & Fun
Rock and Roll is as old and dusty as an unloved museum piece. A quick scan of your radio dial will reveal nothing but bands from the distant past ... or bands trading on nostalgia for different sets of glory days. It is a genre encased in amber, with Led Zeppelins and Soundgardens replacing the unlucky mosquito.
ALEX GALBRAITH
"From Zero To Guitar Hero, Meet The Small-Town Musician Who's Well On His Way", Uproxx, February 4, 2016
Rock 'n' roll is a river of music that has absorbed many streams. All have contributed to the big beat.
ALAN FREED
introduction, CT Rock 'N' Roll
Rock 'n' roll smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. And, by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd and in plain fact, dirty lyrics ... it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of the earth.
FRANK SINATRA
attributed, Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands & Censored Songs
I thought rock and roll was an unassailable outlet for some pure and natural expression of rebellion. It used to be one channel you could take without ever havin' to kiss arse, you know?
KEITH RICHARDS
BBC News, April 4, 2007
It's been a long time since I rock and rolled,
It's been a long time since I did the Stroll.
Ooh, let me get it back, let me get it back,
Let me get it back, baby, where I come from.
It's been a long time, been a long time,
Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time. Yes it has.
LED ZEPPELIN
"Rock and Roll"
My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye
NEIL YOUNG
"Out of the Blue"
Real, undiluted rock-and-roll is almost by definition the province of a dissident minority (larger at some times than at others); it achieved its cultural hegemony in the sixties only by becoming rock--by absorbing competing cultural values and in turn being absorbed, making a new rebellion necessary.
ELLEN WILLIS
Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-And-Roll