Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards on Rap Music: ‘I Don’t Really Like to Hear People Yelling at Me’

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards expressed his distaste for “cheap” pop music and rap, explaining, “I don’t really like to hear people yelling at me.”

“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 rap music to the Telegraph in a recent interview.

The guitarist was discussing different music genres ahead of the release of his band’s next album, Hackney Diamonds — its first studio record in 18 years. Richards noted that he listens to a wide variety of music, including blues, jazz, and classical — but that there are two genres in particular that he is not fond of.

In addition to rap, Richards also doesn’t enjoy pop music, which he said has “always been rubbish,” because it is made “as cheap and as easy as possible,” and he would rather hear music that actually involves “people playing instruments.”

“I don’t want to start complaining about pop music,” Richards said. “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.”

“I like to hear music by people playing instruments,” the guitarist added. “That is, I don’t like to hear plastic synthesized muzak, as it used to be known, what you hear in ­elevators, which is now the par for the course.”

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