Punk Quotes

• Certainly for me, when punk exploded in the 1970s, it was just great. We had these wonderful clothes to wear. We could do great things with our hair. We had protest badges that read "I belong to the Blank Generation." It was such a great time to be a kid.

  

  Boy George Culture Club
  • Kids
  • Wonderful
  • Protest

• All the selling out talk is really overrated, the funny thing is it hardly ever comes from bands, it comes from some kid who thinks they're so punk because they have a purple mohawk.

  

  Tom DeLonge Blink-182
  • Bands
  • Punk
  • Selling Out

• That's what real punk is about - doing it yourself and building a community where people share ideas and share creativity.

  

  Ad-Rock The Beastie Boys
  • Ideas
  • Creativity
  • Share

• I started going to Madame Louise's, the lesbian club where all the punk bands used to go - the Sex Pistols, the Clash. I remember seeing Billy Idol walk in there; he was gorgeous.

  

  Boy George Culture Club
  • Remember
  • Band
  • Clubs

• I can play punk rock, and I love playing punk rock, but I was into every other style of music before I played punk rock.

  

  Travis Barker Blink-182
  • Play
  • Style
  • Rocks

• The whole punk ethic was do-it-yourself, and I've always been very literal, especially as a kid. When they said that anybody can do this, I was like, 'OK, that's me.'

  

  Michael Stipe R.E.M.
  • Kid
  • Punk
  • Literal

• Stray thought for the day: Putting boundaries on how punk should sound/look is the least punk rock thing one can do. Be yourself.

  

  Patrick Stump Fall Out Boy
  • Punk
  • Be Yourself
  • Stray

• Punk came along and grunge made guitar solos uncool.

  

  David Pajo
  • Grunge
  • Along
  • Uncool

• “Punk’ was the only time I fitted in. Just one tiny sliver of time where it was acceptable to say what you thought.”

  

  Viviane Katrina Louise
  • Time
  • Punk
  • Acceptable

• There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.

  

  Dave Grohl Nirvana
  • Ambition
  • Opportunities
  • Play Music

• I watch a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees. In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

  

  William Gibson
  • Trying
  • Grace
  • Scene

• When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.

  

  Nick Lowe Brinsley Schwarz
  • Musical
  • Punk

• Awwww.... I'm not trying to be punk....I just like it... mohawks are cool...when, when you like first get it done it's a bit of a shock... but other than that...yeah i like it...

  

  Ben Gillies Silverchair
  • First
  • Punk
  • Shock

• I come from the home-grown punk ethic, where it doesn't matter if you can't play a note, it's how you communicate.

  

  Siobhan Máire Deirdre Fahey Bananarama
  • Home
  • Matter
  • Ethics

• When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop.

  

  Alex Goot
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Style

• The kid who throws his spaghetti from the high chair onto his father's face, he's pushing back. He's sticking it to the man as he sees it. I like that. So that is punk.

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Men
  • Kids
  • Father

• In a way, all recorded music is reduced to the same level, no matter what it is. You find it in the store, you put it on and, "Oh, that's not cool. That's gangsta rap. That's white supremacist punk." But in a way, the content is removed from the intention of the people that made it. That's the commercial level of music.

  

  Eyvind Kang
  • Music
  • Level
  • Removed

• A significant event for me was learning Hank Williams, reconnecting with his music's simplicity, which inspired me to inhabit the same territory. It's different, because I grew up on Led Zeppelin, The Stooges and punk, so in that sense I'm mutating country and folk more than a few degrees.

  

  Stone Gossard Pearl Jam
  • Learning
  • Degrees
  • Territory

• I was not a popular girl, so being able to create punk who didn't have to be beautiful in the mainstream way helped me to get in touch with sexuality and become comfortable with the idea that I didn't have to look like Farrah Fawcett to feel attractive, to feel sexual power.

  

  Alice Bag
  • Girl
  • Sexuality
  • Attractive

• The single best thing that has happened in my lifetime in music, after punk rock, is being able to share music, globally for free.

  

  Steve Albini Big Black
  • Lifetime
  • Punk

• When someone asks you, 'What's punk?' my reply is, 'If you have to ask, you're never going to know.'

  

  Henry Rollins Black Flag
  • Knows
  • Asks
  • Punk

• When you're thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

  

  Dave Grohl Nirvana
  • Music
  • Listening
  • Punk

• I don't think punk fashion is a specter or overemphasized - it made a big impression, as there had never been anything like it before.

  

  Vivienne Westwood
  • Thinking
  • Fashion
  • Impression

• I was really good friends with Matthew Ashman, the guitarist in Bow Wow Wow. He died, unfortunately. He was one of my best friends during my sort of punk period.

  

  Boy George Culture Club
  • Friend
  • Periods
  • Guitarist

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