51 Pop culture Quotes

I met someone on the street who said wasn't it great that we're going to have a movie star for president, that it was so Pop, and (laughs) when you think about it like that, it is great, it's so American.

I hate the whole reluctant sex-symbol thing. It's such bull. You see these dudes greased up, in their underwear, talking about how they don't want to be a sex symbol.

Political people don't solve stuff - not really. Political people are like guys in pop music.

Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who's better, Michael Jackson or Prince? Prince won!

Charlie Brown is the one person I identify with. C.B. is such a loser. He wasn't even the star of his own Halloween special.

The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director - now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog - and really the process is as like herding as may be.

I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

I really wanted the MTV Award the most, It was a golden popcorn container and it looks really neat.

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture - turning it into Pop art and camp - had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures - and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.

I asked him the most important question that I think you could ask - if he had ever seen Caddyshack.

Christianity will go.. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. 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.

(To Hurricane and Rosey, the Super-Hero In Training) Aww, here are my boys, yeah! Hamburglar! Grimace! Naw, I'm only playin'. (to Hurricane) What it is, you, man! (to Rosey) Damn you don't talk every time the Rock gets around, you talk, man? Don't get like that! I bet you know how to say 'Super-size me' though, don't ya?

My favorite song right now is impossible to defend. It's impossible. We should all be ashamed of ourselves for liking this fucking song. Lil' Jon. You know that shit: 'To the window! To The Wall! [crowd sings along] To the sweat drip from my balls!' You go to clubs, you see girls dance to that shit. 'To the sweat drip from my balls! To the sweat drip from my balls! From my balls! From my balls! My balls!' I feel sorry for the guys that gotta pick a wife out of this bunch. It's like, 'Daddy, where'd you meet Mommy?' 'Oh, she was singing about balls at a club. Skeet, skeet, skeet!'

(To Trish Stratus) Hey Mama! How you doin'? How you- no no no no no! The Rock's gotta go. Don't look at the People's Package. (To Tyson Tomko) Hell, you too, don't look! But it's cool, man! It's all good, I like your show, 'Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'. It's all good!

'Tonight The Rock is going to play movie director, and let you see firsthand the unedited, uncut version of The Rock's major motion picture, entitled 'Laying The Smackdown on Your Roody-Poo Candy Ass!' And when it's all said and done, and all the smoke has cleared, and the millions and the millions of The Rock's fans have finished chanting his name, the Titanic will still be sunk, Monica Lewinsky will still love her cigars, and The Rock will have kicked the living piss out of Mankind!'

Here are some musical vermin whose mothers we wish had had medical plans that included abortion. These singers who think they're so special they only need one name. Bono, Sting, Jewel, Tiffany, Prince : what a crock of shit, get a fucking last name, would you, please? I have a two word name for you: Pretentious Cocksucker. How do you like that? Bono, Sting : it's not bad enough the music sucks, but with no last name, you can't find out where they live to throw a fucking bomb through their window.

'Ninjas are TOTALLY SWEET, what with all the guitar solos & flipping out & totally chopping people's heads off.'

One of the main things that brings people to the Bronte Museum from all over the world is Kate Bush. We have copies of her No 1 hit single ' Wuthering Heights' in our collection of Bronte-related items. People often arrive at the Bronte novels through that song.

I went to the movies to see Independence Day, the outer-space summer blockbuster of 1996. (Even the most committed intellectual can't survive on an unalloyed diet of Jane Austen remakes.)

My predilection for what is hidden,for the mysterious,saved me from the unhappy influence of popular art.

(answers the phone) Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?

I didn't know a cat sang it.

What's the matter with all you people at the back, did you come here to see Gloria Estefan? (11/27/93 at AT&T Bayfront Park Amphitheater, Miami, Florida)

I remember watching Kurt come through and thinking, 'God, this music is nuclear', This is really splitting the atom. They raised the temperature for everybody. Manufactured pop never looked so cold as when that heat was around. Nirvana made everything else look silly.

America's first great surrealist artists were named Walt Disney, Max Fleischer, and Tex Avery. Their artistic medium was cartoon animation, though we must remember that cartoons of this era were seen not only by children but by a mixed audience, consisting mainly of adults. These men took - quite literally - the principles of surrealism and turned them into mass entertainment. As Fleischer's scantily clad Betty Boop ran through a phantasmagoric underground landscape to the driving beat of Cab Calloway's 'Minnie the Moocher,' moviegoers of the Thirties saw surrealist dream-logic unfold more powerfully than in any experimental poem created in Greenwich Village. To this day the greatest moment of North American surrealism is probably Dumbo's drunken nightmare choreographed to the demonic oom-pah-pah of 'Pink Elephants on Parade' from Walt Disney's 1941 movie. When the surrealist style was so quickly assimilated into mass-media comedy, what avant-garde poet could consider it sufficiently chic?

I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art - closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must - as artists, critics, and teachers - reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?

I could be a gay James Bond.

'The claw!' (Liar Liar)

The Walrus was Paul!

Hey Snoop! Snoop-A-Loop!

'Elvis is everywhere. Elvis is everything. Elvis is everybody. Elvis is still the King.'

Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.

Dudley Boyz