Looking for funny music quotes? Here are the wittiest musical quips and insults in history. From the titans of classical music to the pop tarts of today, nobody is safe.
Line of work: Funny quotes about music careers
We open our collection with some observations on making a living as a musician.
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
Elvis Presley
When I was a little boy, I told my dad, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a musician.’ My dad said: ‘You can’t do both, Son’.
Chet Atkins
I’m a concert pianist. That’s a pretentious way of saying I’m unemployed.
Oscar Levant
In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.
Robert Schumann
Instruments of destruction: Making fun of music makers
Here’s a bunch of funny music quotes about the tools of the trade.
Distance lends enchantment.
William Blezard on bagpipes
The piano is a monster that screams when you touch its teeth.
Andrés Segovia
I never practice my guitar. From time to time, I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.
Wes Montgomery
The sound of a harpsichord – two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.
Sir Thomas Beecham
Never look at the trombones; it only encourages them.
Richard Strauss
Music helps set a romantic mood. Imagine her surprise when you say, “We don’t need a stereo – I have an accordion.”
Martin Mull
Some days you get up and put the horn to your chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some days you try and nothing works and the horn wins. This goes on and on and then you die and the horn wins.
Dizzy Gillespie
Vocal critics: Funny insults about singers
Some singers can’t carry a tune. Others, it seems, carry it too far.
His vibrato sounded like he was driving a tractor over a ploughed field with weights tied to his scrotum.
Spike Milligan on the excellently named Ernst Strainz
Sounds as though he’s having his prostate examined by Captain Hook.
Dave Barry on Dan Hill’s Sometimes When We Touch
He sings like he’s throwing up.
Andrew O’Connor on Bryan Ferry
A voice that only got weirder when he started hitting actual notes.
Rob Sheffield on Morrissey
They are now including shreds of melody in their songs, although given Dean Wareham’s difficulties with pitch, this may have been entirely accidental.
J.D. Considine on Galaxie 500
He sang like a hinge.
Ethel Merman on Cole Porter
She was a singer who had to take any note above A with her eyebrows.
Frank Muir
Public opinion: Funny music quotes about audiences
What musicians have to say about their audiences isn’t always music to our ears.
The public doesn’t want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger
It is quite untrue that British people don’t appreciate music. They may not understand it, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Sir Thomas Beecham
There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.
Sir Thomas Beecham
Maestro of mockery: More funny music quotes from Sir Thomas Beecham
English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham may have been heir to Beecham’s Pills laxative fortune, but these quips suggest he felt laughter was the best medicine.
If you will make a point of singing “All we, like sheep, have gone astray” with a little less satisfaction, we shall meet the aesthetical as well as the theological requirements.
Sir Thomas Beecham
We can’t expect you to be with us all the time, but perhaps you would be good enough to keep in touch now and again.
Sir Thomas Beecham
Brass bands are all very well in their place; outdoors and several miles away.
Sir Thomas Beecham
Get married.
Sir Thomas Beecham, asked by an auditioning cellist what she should do next
Music appreciation: The classical experience
Classical means different things to different people, as these next funny music quotes show.
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Kin Hubbard
I have been going to symphony concerts for fifty years and I find I mind it less and less.
Louise Kent
A highbrow is anyone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
Jack Perlis
Comic opera: Insults about the operatic arts
Now it’s time for some funny music quotes about the fat lady singing.
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Gioachino Rossini
One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.
Gioachino Rossini
I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.
Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress
I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.
Dave Barry
Unpopular music: Funny insults across the genres
In which our contributors take a pop at various types of pop music.
I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.
Bob Newhart
Disco music is a kind of background music louder than anything in the foreground.
Miles Kington
Rap music sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.
Dave Barry
The principle of crooning is to use as little voice as possible and instead to make a sentimental appeal by prolonged moaning somewhere near the written notes.
Eric Blom
Rock ‘n’ Roll is monotony tinged with hysteria.
Vance Packard
Those British boys want to play the blues real bad. And they do.
Sonny Boy Williamson II on the Yardbirds, his backing band at the time
All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.
Louis Armstrong
Cool cats: Funny music quotes about jazz
Over the years, a few people have taken a swing at jazz.
Jazz isn’t dead. It just smells funny.
Frank Zappa
Playing bop is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Duke Ellington
It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie
Big bland music: Insulting the insipid
Our next set of funny music quotes cover music that our contributors consider wishy-wishy.
The musical equivalent of blancmange.
Bernard Levin on Frederick Delius
The odd and pleasant taste of a pink sweet filled with snow.
Claude Debussy on Grieg’s music
The audience seemed rather disappointed; they expected the ocean, something big, something colossal, but they were served instead with some agitated water in a saucer.
Louis Schneider on Debussy’s La Mer
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
Aaron Copland
I liked the bit about quarter to eleven.
Satie on From Dawn to Noon on the Sea from Debussy’s La Mer
Mr. Adams has done for the arpeggio what McDonalds did for the hamburger.
New York Times on John Adams’ minimalism
Settling scores: Stravinsky and his peers
Collectors of funny music quotes owe Igor Stravinsky a debt of gratitude. His witty commentary on fellow composers produced many gems and his stylistic range prompted some pithy responses from colleagues and critics.
A six-and-a-half foot scowl.
Igor Stravinsky on Rachmaninov
Vivaldi did not write 500 concertos, he wrote the same concerto 500 times.
Igor Stravinsky
Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don’t like, it’s always by Villa-Lobos?
Igor Stravinsky on Heitor Villa-Lobos
Pretty monotonous and monotonously pretty.
Igor Stravinsky on Pierre Boulez
Bach on the wrong notes.
Prokofiev on Stravinsky’s instrumental music
His music used to be original. Now it is aboriginal.
Ernest Newman on Stravinsky
My music is best understood by children and animals.
Igor Stravinsky
Greatest hits: Rock reviews that don’t pull any punches
Here are some funny music quotes from rock reviewers and other trenchant critics.
Five bowls of muesli looking for a spoon.
The New Musical Express on Yes
Background music for watching tropical fish sleep.
Alan Niester on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn
All the finesse of a kindergarten percussion group.
Pop Scene on Alice Cooper
This fourth-form philosophising meander across the fretboards of the consciousness, attempting to be Orwell, ending up being awful.
Melody Maker on Pink Floyd’s The Wall
Greta Van Fleet sound like they did weed exactly once, called the cops, and tried to record a Led Zeppelin album before they arrested themselves.
Jeremy D. Larson
I’m not saying it’s a bad song, you know, or anything like that. All I’m saying is that if you get, I don’t know, a broom, say, and dip it in some brake fluid, put the other end up my arse, stick me on a trampoline in a moving lift, and I would write a better song on the walls. That’s all I’m saying.
Dylan Moran on The Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim
Title fights: Funny music quotes about album names
Some album titles are just asking for trouble, as these short, sharp music reviews show.
Bad then, worse now.
Rolling Stone on Asia’s Then and Now
No Thanks
Melody Maker on the Happy Mondays’ Yes Please
SHT
J. D. Considine on GTR’s self-titled album
Something’s missing: Music theory and malpractice
What is and what isn’t music? These funny quotes investigate the metaphysics of music.
I liked your opera. One day I think I’ll set it to music.
Beethoven to Ferdinando Paer
What a good thing this isn’t music.
Rossini on Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique
Debussy played the piano with the lid down.
Robert Bresson
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
Samuel Johnson
Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.
Greil Marcus
He sometimes brings out records with the greatest titles in the world, which somewhere along the line he forgets to write songs for.
Elvis Costello on Morrissey
Jack Benny played Mendelssohn last night. Mendelssohn lost.
Isaac Stern
Corrections: Setting the record straight
In these funny music quotes, famous musicians clear up some misunderstandings that have been bothering them.
I’m sick to death of people saying we’ve made 11 albums that sound exactly the same. We’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.
Angus Young on AC/DC
Let me be clear about this. I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.
Keith Richards
Oh well, you play Bach your way; I’ll play him his.
Wanda Landowska
Getting personal: Insulting the stars
Many funny music quotes focus on the musician, not the music. Here’s a short selection.
It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.
Dolly Parton
She drags feminism along casually in her slinking stride like a cavewoman who has just killed her dinner … She looks like a whore and thinks like a pimp.
Julie Burchill on Madonna
Bambi with testosterone.
Owen Glieberman on Prince
He looks like a dwarf who’s been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair.
Boy George on Prince
Sleeping with George Michael would be like having sex with a groundhog.
Boy George
I love his work but I couldn’t warm to him even if I was cremated next to him. Keith Richards on Chuck Berry
Stuart Adamson was a Big Country member. And we do remember.
Mark Lamarr
Andrew Lloyds Bank
Private Eye’s nickname for Andrew Lloyd Webber
If only we lived in a world where movie titles were legally binding.
Robbie Collin on Miley Cyrus’s The Last Song
It should be against the law to be Fred Durst.
Ryan Broderick rating Limp Bizkit’s Nookie as the worst song of all time
Oscar, why don’t you sit down and play us a medley of your hit?
George Gershwin to Oscar Levant
The ego has landed: Confidence tricks
Self promotion helps in the music business, though sometimes this becomes a performance in its own right, as these funny music quotes show.
What the world needs is more geniuses with humility. There are so few of us left.
Oscar Levant
When I die, bury me on my stomach and let the world kiss my ass.
L.L. Cool J
Musically, we are more talented than any Bob Dylan. Musically, we are more talented than Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger. I’m the new modern rock ‘n’ roll. I’m the new Elvis.
Rob Pilatus, before it was revealed he and Fab Morvan
lip-synched all Milli Vanilli songs
I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.
David Bowie
God chose me. He made a path for me. I am God’s vessel. My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.
Kanye West
Is everyone lowkey losing it right now or just me n Kanye.
Mitch Modes on Kanye West
The business of music: Patrons, promoters and other parasites
The people who are supposed to support musicians are often neither appreciative nor appreciated.
We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
Decca Records’ 1962 rejection of The Beatles
Peter Grant: Hello, Bob. I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.
Bob Dylan: Do I come to you with my problems?
Bob Dylan
Fritz Kreisler: My fee to play at your party is eighteen thousand dollars.
Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt: That’s agreeable, but I hope you understand that you should not mingle with my guests.
Fritz Kreisler: Oh! Well, in that case, my fee is only five hundred dollars.
Fritz Kreisler
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.
Hunter S. Thompson.
His Majesty does not know what the Band has just played but it is never to be played again.
King George V on hearing the Grenadier Guards playing Richard Strauss’ Elektra
Too many notes.
Archduke Ferdinand to Wolfgang Mozart
Poison pens: Funny quotes about music writing
Our last set of funny music quotes considers the merits of the music experts.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Martin Mull
Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.
Frank Zappa
A musicologist is a man who can read music but can’t hear it.
Sir Thomas Beecham
The articles on Discover Music – Classic FM are nice and accessible and include some good collections of quotes about classical music and musicians. We also found a few of these quotes among the interesting discussions on Music Corner | Steve Hoffman Music Forums.