The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards can’t always get what he wants out of pop and rap music.
The 79-year-old Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee slammed the two music genres in a look at his life and career in a recent interview with The Telegraph.
“I don’t really like to hear people yelling at me and telling me it’s music, AKA rap. I can get enough of that without leaving my house,” Richards said of one of the music genres.
Richards – who has a music taste that includes the sounds of blues, jazz and classical music – said he didn’t “want to start complaining about pop music,” too, before offering his two cents on the music genre.
“It’s always been rubbish. I mean, that’s the point of it. They make it as cheap and as easy as possible and therefore it always sounds the same; there’s very little feel in it,” said Richards, whose manager reportedly once “instructed” him to drop the s in his surname because it “looked more pop.”
“I like to hear music by people playing instruments. That is, I don’t like to hear plastic synthesised Muzak, as it used to be known, what you hear in elevators, which is now the par for the course.”
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Richards has criticized one of the two music genres in the past, telling the New York Daily News back in 2015, “What rap did that was impressive was to show there are so many tone-deaf people out there.”
He continued: “All they need is a drum beat and somebody yelling over it and they’re happy. There’s an enormous market for people who can’t tell one note from another.”
The rock icon told Rolling Stone magazine in 2007 that hip-hop leaves him “cold.”
“But there are some people out there who think it’s the meaning of life,” he explained.
Richards’ latest comments on the music world arrive just weeks before he and The Stones are set to drop “Hackney Diamonds,” their first album of original material in 18 years and the first since the 2021 death of their drummer Charlie Watts.
Read more from The Telegraph’s interview with Richards here.