Rock and roll

"Hail, hail rock and roll; deliver me from the days of old. Long live rock and roll; the beat of the drums, loud and bold. Rock, rock, rock and roll; the feelin' is there, body and soul."

"Rock and roll is a music, and why should a music contribute to … juvenile delinquency? If people are going to be juvenile delinquents, they're going to be delinquents if they hear … Mother Goose rhymes."

"… I just know that, right now, … the biggest record selling business there is is rock and roll."

"Rock and Roll is a means of pulling the White Man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation."

"Just let me hear some of that rock and roll music Any old way you choose it It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it Any old time you use it It's gotta be rock roll music If you want to dance with me"

"When I listen to this rock and roll and look at you kids, I don't think it's a whole lot different than the Charleston and the Varsity Drag."

"The profound sacred and spiritual meaning of the great music of the church must never be mixed with the transitory quality of rock and roll music. The former serves to lift men's souls to higher levels of reality and therefore to God. The latter so often plunges men's minds into degrading and immoral depths.""

"We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."

"Why should Americans, Negro or white, forget or deny where rock and roll came from, what produced it, why it is here? Especially when the English haven't forgotten and the French still remember. Cadillacs, juke boxes, heat, oppression, violence, happiness — who has that in England on such a scale as you do in America?"

"In truth, it has no beginning and no end, for it is the very pulse of life itself."

"Most rock journalism is people who can't write, interviewing people who can't talk, for people who can't read."

"Long live rock, I need it every night. Long live rock, come on and join the line. Long live rock, be it dead or alive."

"If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it Chuck Berry."

"It's only Rock and Roll but I like it."

"Sex and drugs and rock and roll Is all my brain and body need. Sex and drugs and rock and roll Is very good indeed."

"I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll."

"I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll."

"Rock and roll is dead, and we don't care."

"In fact rock, rather than being an example of how freedom can be achieved within the capitalist structure, is an example of how capitalism can, almost without conscious effort, deceive those whom it oppresses....So effective has the rock industry been in encouraging the spirit of optimistic youth take-over that rock's truly hard political edge, its constant exploration of the varieties of youthful frustration, has been ignored and softened."

"Rock and roll music ... is not rhythm and blues music; it's not country and western music; it's not jazz; it's a combination of these things."

"No matter how long you play rock and roll, songs might change just as long as the balls are there, the rock balls. And that's what's important to us"

"Rock and roll is the hamburger that ate the world. Electric rock music creeps, like chemical seasoning, into everything. Rock and roll is mother's little helper on the housewife radio, plays across film sound-tracks and sells packaged goods."

"My my, hey hey... Rock and roll is here to stay. Hey hey, my my... Rock and roll will never die."

"We're just going to play rock and roll and not do anything else; we're going to stay in our rooms, and the world is a nasty, horrible place because it didn't give us everything we cried for.' Right?"

"[Rock music] is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious. … Now all has been explored; light has been cast everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business glitz."

"I'd like to live off the band, but if not, I'll just retire to Mexico or Yugoslavia with a few hundred dollars, grow potatoes, and learn the history of rock through back issues of Creem magazine."

"No change in musical style will survive unless it is accompanied by a change in clothing style. Rock is to dress up to."

"As I define it, rock and roll is dead. The attitude isn't dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn't have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive -- and it still informs other kinds of music."

"Tonight I am going to defecate on stage because I think that is the only way to express the nature of my soul according to rock and roll."

"Hey kids, where are you? Nobody tells you what to do, baby. Hey kids, rock and roll, Nobody tells you where to go, baby."

"Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law / Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore"

"Rock and roll ain't no pollution. Rock and roll is just rock and roll."

"If you live in rock and roll, as I do, you see the reality of sex, of male lust and women being aroused by male lust. It attracts women. It doesn't repel them."

"I like rock and roll, and I don't like much else."

"Rock and roll doesn't necessarily mean a band. It doesn't mean a singer, and it doesn't mean a lyric, really. It's that question of trying to be immortal."

"Ever since I was 12 years old, I've had to defend my love of heavy metal against those who say it's a less valid form of music. My answer now is that you either feel it, or you don't. If metal doesn't give you that overwhelming surge of power and make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, you might never get it. And you know what? That's ok; because judging by the 40,000 metalheads around me, we're doing just fine without you."

"Rock and Roll: Music for the neck downwards."

"Rock and roll outfits, commence!"

"If it's illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!"

"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?"

"Blackboard Jungle is perhaps best remembered for its theme song, “Rock Around the Clock,” performed by Bill Haley and the Comets over the film’s opening title sequence. The song, written by Max C. Freedman and Jimmy DeKnight (a pseudonym for James E. Myers), was first recorded by Sonny Dae and His Knights, but it was not until Haley’s 1954 version was used on the film’s soundtrack that it held the #1 spot on the Billboard Chart for seven weeks (July 9–August 20, 1955). After receiving national airplay (the first for a rock song), “Rock Around the Clock” became the bestselling single to date. An expression of teenage defiance and rebellion against authority, coupled with its link to a film about juvenile delinquency, “Rock Around the Clock” was adopted by teenagers around the world as their official anthem."

""Rock and Roll" is about me. If I hadn't heard rock and roll on the radio, I would have had no idea there was life on this planet. Which would have been devastating to think that everything, everywhere was like it was where I come from. That would have been profoundly discouraging. Movies didn't do it for me. TV didn't do it for me. It was the radio that did it."

"The heart of rock and roll is the beat."

"As the story goes, country slept with the blues in Memphis and gave birth to rock n’ roll. After a while, country got tired and went back to Nashville. And while that’s admittedly an oversimplification, a look at the intertwining history of the three genres reveals it to be an apt extended metaphor."