Art & Creativity Quote by Kim Wilde

There is something quietly defiant in Kim Wilde admitting she still turns on the radio for pop. In an industry that trains aging artists to either retreat into nostalgia circuits or posture as tastemakers above the mainstream, her line refuses both. It reads like a small act of cultural citizenship: she is not just a legacy name with a catalog; she is still part of the audience.

The intent is simple on the surface - enjoyment - but the subtext is about legitimacy and continuity. Pop is often treated as disposable, a young person’s medium that you “grow out of” once you develop supposedly better taste. Wilde pushes back against that ladder-of-seriousness narrative. By stressing “as much as I ever have,” she frames pleasure as a stable value, not a phase. That matters coming from someone whose peak visibility was in the early MTV era: she is implicitly refusing the story that her relationship to pop must be frozen in 1981.

The context also hints at how pop listening has changed. “Tune in to the radio” sounds almost stubbornly analog in a streaming-first world, signaling a preference for shared, curated experience over algorithmic self-confirmation. Radio is where you accept being surprised, where you don’t fully control the feed. Wilde’s statement is less about chasing relevance than about staying porous to the present - an artist insisting that pop still works on her, that the craft of the hook and the thrill of the new haven’t stopped just because time passed.