Art & Creativity Quote by Teena Marie

Teena Marie stops herself mid-thought and, in that unfinished sentence, tells you almost everything about how power works in pop. "I think that's the problem in a lot of music" sets up a diagnosis that isn’t about melody or talent; it’s about the machinery around them. Then she lands on the real subject: "We’ve got these record labels" - an almost weary shrug toward the gatekeepers who decide what gets funded, polished, marketed, and effectively, heard.

The intent is blunt: labels aren’t neutral distributors; they’re curators with balance sheets. Teena Marie came up in an era when R&B and pop were increasingly engineered for radio formats and quarterly returns, and she lived the contradictions firsthand: a white artist deeply rooted in Black musical tradition, nurtured by mentors like Rick James, navigating an industry quick to package identity and quick to penalize deviation. That background makes her phrasing feel less like abstract criticism and more like lived frustration.

The subtext is about control disguised as collaboration. "We’ve got" is telling - it implicates the whole ecosystem, including artists who sign, comply, compromise, and sometimes get trapped. The sentence cuts off because the rest is almost too obvious: labels shape the music by shaping the incentives. They reward sameness, push timing over craft, and turn risk into a liability. Coming from Teena Marie, the complaint also carries an artist’s pride: music is supposed to be a voice, not a product brief.