All popular music (and all folk music, by definition), essentially, if not legally, exists in a public domain. Listening to pop music isn't a matter of choice. Asked for or not, we're bombarded by it. In its most insidious state, filtered to an incessant bass-line, it seeps through apartment walls and out of the heads of walk people. Although people in general are making more noise than ever before, fewer people are making more of the total noise; specifically, in music, those with megawatt PA's, triple platinum sales, and heavy rotation. Difficult to ignore, pointlessly redundant to imitate, how does one not become a passive recipient?
– John Oswald

 

Sometimes, I'll put a loop on and let it play for, like, two or three days. I've done it before. When you do something like that, you get to hear all different parts and pieces and elements of it that you never really heard before.... It probably sounds strange to a lotta people, but you get to hear stuff that the musician didn't try to put in there. You know what I mean? It's just in there.
– DJ Kool Akiem

 

Underscoring [the search for an answer to "what is popular music?"] is the academic imperative that music, if we are to understand it in its present travails, has to be apprehended and analysed in terms completely different from those we currently employ. It has to be understood in terms of its means and relations of production, in terms of the specific social and political forces which enclose it and in terms of its role as a language—which is to say, in terms of its cultural and aesthetic meaning. Certainly these forces give rise to forms, but plastic and protean forms. Surely these forms can be comprehended in terms of the forces which produce them, but the forces can not be discovered and contained by the forms considered as little worlds unto themselves; forms are effects, not causes, and it is the shaping forces that we need to apprehend, not merely the parade of shapes.
– Chris Cutler

 

In Zen they say: If something is boring for two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all but very interesting.
– John Cage

 

It comes to me natural, it comes to me easy
I just lay back and let the big beat lead me
– Jungle Brothers

 

Non-Western music in general and African, Indonesian and Indian music in particular will serve as new structural models for Western musicians. Not as new models of sound. (That's the old exoticism trip.) Those of us who love the sounds will hopefully just go and learn how to play these musics.…
Music schools will be resurrected through offering instruction in the practice and theory of all the world's music. Young composers/performers will form all sorts of new ensembles growing out of one or several or the world's musical traditions.…
The pulse and the concept of clear tonal center will re-emerge as basic sources of new music
– Steve Reich

 

La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
La la la la la la la la
I just can’t get you out of my head
– Kylie Minogue

 

Perhaps the single most important feature of the twentieth-century musical culture is its gradual but pervasive African-Americanization.…Given its ubiquity, black pop music would seem to be the element most clearly responsible for converting our collective sense of time from tortured heroic narratives to cycles of kinetic pleasure. As Prince sings, "There's joy in repetition!" One can even perceive a strong influence of African based patterning in both the experimental music and rock of the 1960s—the time when the influence of Asian practices is most explicit. The blues and its descendants had predisposed both rockers and minimalist composers to experience time in this way, even if their attraction to Buddhism of Hindu mysticism led them to propose a somewhat different lineage.
– Susan McClary

 

I got kicks on the one, seven and eleven
Snares on the five and thirteen
Rhymes on time and that's the given
We're hot on the disco scene. Check it, check it.
– The Beastie Boys

 

The psychology of art has always favored fragmentary "theft" in a way which does not engender a loss to the owner. In fact, most artists speak freely about the amount of stuff they have stolen at one time or another. In the realm of ideas, techniques, styles, etc. most artists know that stealing (or call it 'being influenced' if you want to sound legitimate) is not only OK, but desirable and even crucial to creative evolution. This proven route to progress has prevailed among artists since art began and will not be denied. To creators, it is simply obvious in their own experience.
Now some will say there is a big difference between stealing ideas, techniques, and styles which are not easily copyrighted, and stealing actual material, which is easily copyrighted. However, aside from the copyright deterrence factor which now prevails throughout our law-bound art industries, we can find nothing intrinsically wrong with an artist deciding to incorporate existing art "samples" into their own work. The fact that we have economically motivated laws against it does not necessarily make it an undesirable artistic move. In fact, this kind of theft has a well-respected tradition in the arts extending back to the Industrial Revolution.
– Negativland