Paul McCartney--
[On his songwriting:]
McCartney: "I don't ever try to make a serious social comment. ... It's just a song."
McCartney: "How I wrote depended on my mood. The only way I would be sort of biting and witty like [John Lennon] was if I was in a bad mood!"
I don't buy into this just a song stuff. Seeing how huge and influential music is (starting around the time of, and at least in part because of Beatlemania) I think there is some responsibility there.
That's pretty much the one thing I agree with Jimmy Swaggart on:
Stop listening when he gets to the bit about Satan... though maybe he has a point, looking at the top 40 list and what has become of youth culture.
Now that doesn't mean you can't have some fun and make Ringo sing the silly ones for a lark (actually my Dad's favorite Beatles tracks.... aside from the really early stuff; She Loves Me era), but you do have a responsibility to not only not be banal ( we've already conducted that experiment and it didn't go well) but to live up to being the "conscience of society" - I forget who said that, but then there's also:
The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization.
-Jacob Getlar Smith
The flip side of that is not taking yourself too bloody seriously while you're at it. Tough balance.