Paul Morley Quotes

Pop music is not just a clumsy mass fanaticism, connected to a deceitful enchantment totally lacking in moral rigour.

It's kind of great being a group without a lead singer, because the possibilities are sky high. Odd things become the lead singer, noises become the lead singer. It actually makes the thing much more flexible.

I know, or I dream, that pop music can search out limits, mock restrictions and divisions, exorcise cultural nightmares, contribute to revitaiisation of people's thinking, disturb and inspire if only through its unstable mobility, its readiness to pursue apparently irrelevant links and private associations.

All change begins with someone having a thought.

We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved.

Music is careful attention paid to ongoing experience.

I'm not denying that in the world there's been some tremendous musical happenings, like DJ Shadow or whatever, that kind of thing. But when it goes into the weird thing where you get a remix done by a certain person because they need a brand name, that's when it becomes really discouraging.

There's endless possibilities to taking music into the future by using music that actually was 100 years old.

Pop music can play a large part in the way numerous young people determine their right to desire and their need to question.

If post-punk enterprise suggested that pop music could establish a fierce skittishness, an aggressive self-irony, that would enable it to transcend its manufactured state, video narcissism announces that pop has found an easy way to steal more cash from young people and damage their natural desires.

I think the internet and the web is just like a big consciousness of the planet, a big brain of the planet.

Essentially the soul of the planet is being controlled by corporations.

There's different ways of presenting a pop group to the world. It doesn't have to be the same old poses.

It's going to be an interesting dilemma for certain corporations. They've worked so hard to make themselves important in the way music goes out into the world, but it's completely irrelevant when people can get their music in a different way.

The remix culture became very much controlled by the corporate world, it's a marketing tool mostly, to create mixes for different genres. So it's very soul-less in a way.

The corporations have all their marketing tools, but it's so much better to go in and find out what's going on and what people are thinking.

Pop music - what used to be known as rock music, a loud novelty - can be something more than a pointless, artificial diversion.

Pop music can somehow survive being inhibited and mangled by its harsh and stupid commercial chains, and there is surely irreducible potential because of the 'star system' and the volatile attention pop receives for multiples of wickedness, ridicule, discontent, eccentricity, desire to thrive importantly in a genuinely popular context.

Through pop music ideas, energies and resources can emerge that can help the audience release themselves from the unrelieving confinements of environment.

I always thought that pop groups were going to be made up in the 21st century. It wouldn't be four musicians, as such. Especially in the online world, with the worlds that are opening up.