Punk Quotes
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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
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You can't be a punk all your life.
Ben Eine
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Punk is the way of those who are unable to express themselves, but they aren't dangerous; at worst, they may kill their audience.
Mike Oldfield
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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
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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
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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
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I formed a band when I was about 13, and we all listened to punk - or what we thought was punk!
Tim Gane
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When you're thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.
Dave Grohl Nirvana
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Whether or not punk is the flavor of the month is not important for us. Bad Religion has been popular through many different climates. When heavy metal was popular, when new wave was popular, Bad Religion was still there underneath the mainstream selling more and more records.
Gregory Walter Graffin Bad Religion
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We really try not to spend too much time thinking about what we're supposed to be a punk band, or whatever. We do the exact same thing today that we been doing for years and years and years.
Mark Hoppus Blink-182
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A lot of people think that punk rock musicians don't know what they're doing.
Travis Barker Blink-182
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We had no money, and we had to go through 'punk' school. We ended up living in the rehearsal room that used to be the Sex Pistols rehearsal room at Malcolm McLaren's office. So we had this sort of interesting beginning.
Keren Woodward Bananarama
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Caitlin Cary and I were always talking about X when we talked about whiskeytown, before it became an actual band. We like the concept of there being no real front person in X, yet this kind of switch up of vocals and really their sheer power, and their ability to sort of bastardise punk rock and midwetsren rock and even country into their own sound.
Ryan Adams
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Everybody wasn't always wasted. Why is punk rock about getting wasted? Isn't it punk rock to be sober and change the world? I thought it was about challenging capitalism? How are you going to challenge capitalism if you're wasted?
Kathleen Hanna Bikini Kill
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I was about 16 when punk started to happen... It felt like you had this naive idea that you could change things just by wearing something.
Boy George Culture Club
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On a scale of one to ten, how punk am I? Apple. I don't use your scale.
Eugene Mirman
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I've always thought that "punk" wasn't really a genre. My band started in Olympia where K Records was and K Records put out music that didn't sound super loud and aggressive. And yet they were punk because they were creating culture in their own community instead of taking their cue from MTV about what was real music and what was cool. It wasn't about a certain fashion. It was about your ideology, it was about creating a community and doing it on your own and not having to rely on, kinda, "The Man" to brand you and say that you were okay.
Kathleen Hanna Bikini Kill
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I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It's my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I'm punk.
Agnes Varda
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I don't listen to punk any more, unless it's right before I play. Not that I don't like it, it's nostalgic. But, it's for kids and it should be it's not art, it's expression.
Tom DeLonge Blink-182
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Punk rock really came out of N.Y. as a philosophy before the groups were ever recorded. I had a kind-of intellectual interest in the idea of creating a new scene that could be a grassroots thing.
Greg Ginn Black Flag