Punk Quotations

Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.

I do fear for the generations of people who came of age thinking that pop-punk is what punk is, and that all the rebellion you need is just to stick your tongue out in the mirror every once in a while.

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am'.

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

I enjoy punk, the attitude as well as the music, but I don't feel like I have to be a carbon copy of it and invite all this controversy just to be punk rock.

Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's.

I made the big turnaround in the early Nineties when I started hearing all the tenth generation punk bands like Green Day and Offspring and all those people. It just made me fall in love with punk again and remember my roots, and since that time I've always wanted to do more of that kind of music again.

When I first played '1234' it was on stage in San Francisco at some kind of, like, sticky-floored club. And it felt like a punk song. I mean it's ridiculous to say that now, but it had that kind of, like, piercing straight melody. And then this fist-pumping ending, you know that pa-dap-pada.

I used to hang out with a bunch of old punk rockers when I was a little kid.

I formed a band when I was about 13, and we all listened to punk - or what we thought was punk!

When I listen to most forms of music, in their most raw and pure, it all has a punk edge to me, like Lead Belly, Jimmie Rodgers, Otis Redding or Nirvana.

The New York Dolls did not think of themselves as punk rock. There was no such term at the time. They were just another band in what was called the New York scene.

In the 1970s, we had Carl Sagan, and he was so suave with his turtleneck and his tweed jacket. And he was, you know, he made science look cool. And in punk rock, we haven't had that. We haven't had the Carl Sagan of punk.

I'm still secretly a bit of a punk. Love The Clash and a bit of the Pistols. I guess as I've got older I've chilled out a bit. But, my teenage angst is still stirring somewhere!

I love a lot of music that's considered folk music, but I also love a lot of music that's considered punk or considered rap. I don't mind being called a folk singer. But it seems a bit limiting. I want to be able to write whatever kind of song I want.

I guess I would call my music blues punk. Theres a lot of influences.

I have a karaoke punk band called The Ungrateful Dead, but we don't exist yet.

Growing up in San Diego, I can remember going with my brother to see bands like Pennywise and NOFX - good punk bands that were fast and tight.

You gotta know that you're better than anybody, 'cause to me, if you don't go in like that, you're gonna lose! They're gonna punk you out! On any stage, court, business venture, on the anchor desk - whatever. You've got to go in believing, 'I can do this better than anybody.'

Every place has its own punk flavor, but they all borrowed ideas from SoCal. It's still a vibrant scene creeping into every crevasse of youth culture. When you hear grunge, you think of the '90s, but when you hear L.A. punk, it's timeless.

A lot of punk rock is not going to be in the mainstream. It's below the radar. The beauty of it is that you're not supposed to always know. It's subterranean.

I started making music with my band in the '80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.

Teachers didn't like me very much. They thought I was just this punk kid and they always wanted to kick me out.

I kind of remember a friend of mine saying, like, you guys should make a rap record. You know, because we were already making punk records. We were a punk band. And I kind of thought, that's crazy.

I love punk rock, but I also love metal.

The words we spoke and our entire punk performance aimed to express our disapproval of a specific political event: the patriarchs' support of Vladimir Putin, who has taken an authoritarian and anti-feminist course.

I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.

Punk is not dead. Punk will only die when corporations can exploit and mass produce it.

There are aspects of Asian culture in my work, but it's really rooted in an American experience - transcendentalism, '60s counterculture, punk rock.

And I used to go the punk clubs such as a gay club in Poland Street that everyone would go to because it was the only place you could go to looking like that without getting beaten senseless.

All punk is is attitude. That's what makes it. The attitude.

Were it not for the Clash, punk would have been just a sneer, a safety pin and a pair of bondage trousers.

There is a great deal of cyberpunk that I admire, especially the work of William Gibson which I think is excellent. Somehow he speaks from his own heart and cyber punk is what comes out.

Even though we're not the most punk rock band, the way we've done things is pretty punk rock. Just kinda say it with a big middle finger to the record labels and do it ourselves.

Initially, electronic music was anti-establishment, as punk rock and rock n' roll were. The music was shut down; the police were against the parties.

I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great, the hamburger was terrific, and they had a doctor who made house calls.

I think my style is quite grungy and punky. I love the '90s and the music from that time, and I love punk music. I'm also a fan of mixing vintage with some high fashion, which links back to my musical taste because I tend to mix old music with newer songs.

Folk-punk artists like This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb or Paul Baribeau were popular in the Florida punk community. I saw people early on combine roots music with more aggressive music.

I always said punk was an attitude. It was never about having a Mohican haircut or wearing a ripped T-shirt. It was all about destruction, and the creative potential within that.

Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It's so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, 'It took me ages to get into jazz.'

I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.

To me, John Lennon and Elvis Presley were punks, because they made music that evoked those emotions in people.

All of the punk-rock bands of the era would come in and play, and my job on Punk Rock Night was that I would go into the slam pit, and... I was 24 or 25, and I'd slam dance in the pit.

Punk is not just the sound, the music. Punk is a lifestyle.

I had moments of my actions and words not reflecting who it is I am - if that defines a punk, then yes, absolutely.

Country music is completely punk-rock. It's the original punk-rock.

I guess, for me, what started me getting real excited about music was the New York punk and new-wave scene. All those bands looked back to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges and the Modern Lovers as well. But that was back when Television were punk, and the Talking Heads were punk.

Barry White, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield are big influences for me. But I'm also a metal head. I was in a bunch of punk rock bands. The Bee Gees, hip-hop and the Beach Boys are just as much of an influence on me as Smokey.

Some days I want to look like a hipster kid, and then other days I want to be prim and proper. I really wish I had, like, seven lives so I could go from being a hipster one day to a punk the next. But that's the great thing about fashion. In a way, it's like acting, because you can try on all these different roles.

There are several books out on punk history, but I haven't read any of them. I was there.

I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.

I've always thought that gaming and YouTube and the web is a very post-punk extravaganza.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

When I was a punk teenager, I rebelled because lots of people in Iceland think that foreigners are evil and that if you don't wear woolen hats and eat sheep, you're betraying your heritage.

Punk rock has become another viable art form. It always was. But now it's like everyone's doing it.

I never understood why the metal heads in my school hated the punks.

People perceive punk rock in the sense of Sid Vicious, all strung-out, crazy and insane.

I enjoy everything. I actually do listen to everything. In high school, I listened to a lot of metal and punk rock.

It's hard to imagine the whole punk movement without The Velvet Underground. I toured with them when they did their reunion tour, and no one sounds like that; they are a very unique-sounding band.

I was the punk outsider who nobody messed with. I was fearless. At 16, I graduated and moved out.

I love punk, I love a lot of British Invasion bands, I love garage bands.

My go-to necktie is jet black, skinny, and simple. It goes with everything. I really like that mod-ish punk look.

I was the only punk rocker at my high school. And there were at least a handful of black kids who liked hip-hop. Both were kind of the new music of the day, and it was lonely being the only punk.

When punk really started to happen, it was a reaction against the disco craze of the time.

People can talk about punk all they want, but after new wave put that down, metal is the voice of the disenfranchised and that need to become unhinged. That's why it appeals to so many people when they are younger and carries over when those people, at 40, don't want to grow up.

I'm a bit multifaceted in the sense that I've got many more than one musical taste. If you think about it, I started out playing in a punk band and ended up doing electro-pop. That was more an accident than a plan.

To see classic rock, you had to go to an arena. But punk was happening everywhere, even in little towns in the middle of nowhere in Maryland. I'd drive out to places I'd never been, just to go and see it.

When I was a teenager, science meshed with my developing ideals - such as the challenge to authority that was central to punk rock. In science, anyone from any walk of life could make a discovery that would overturn prevailing hypotheses. And that was a cause for celebration among scientists.

I definitely was attracted to similar things in punk and science. They both depend on a healthy dose of skepticism.

People who are creative, who do it as a lifestyle, it's kind of silly to make that claim you're done, because you just never know when that spark is going to hit you again. You can't necessarily predict how you're going to feel. In ten years I'll be 58, and I might still feel like making a punk record.

I'm a punk rocker. I don't do Christian.

After the Ramones, it was more about new wave for me than punk.

Ideologically, the pursuit of science is not that different from the ideology that goes into punk rock. The idea of challenging authority is consistent with what I have been taught as a scientist.

Punk will never be dead to me. It's my life. I can never just drop this lifestyle. It embodies me.

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.

I never thought of Green Day as a punk band. Just bubblegum, really.

I listened a little to punk when I was younger, but it was straight edge punk. It was nothing like what is going on now, like poppy punk.

I was originally like a punker, know what I mean, like the punks are today, I'd spit in a minute.

I think English punk died in '79 or '80. Maybe '82 at the latest. As far as American punk goes, it wasn't the same as English punk. It wasn't a working-class movement that was protesting the conditions under which this class had to work. I don't think American punk ever died.

In the early days, myself and my friends were into punk because we had no money, just very basic instruments and skills. It was more about the ethos and the energy.

I've known a lot of people who were punkers who went on to get academic degrees. Very few of them, however, continued their active role in the punk community. Most of them hung up their leather jacket when they did so.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

In the end, punk inevitably burned itself out and acted as a bridge across which the New Romantics could sashay in their chiffon and glossy hair.

The thing about punk is that there are purists. Once you start going outside of that, they don't think what you're doing is punk rock.

I love punk rock, The Clash, The Ramones, The Cramps. I love where it all came from, and music for my ears now, it has to have that same electricity, adrenaline and danger.

I was a punk before it got its name. I had that hairstyle and purple lipstick.

I wanted to be in a punk band before I had even heard any punk music.

I was never really that interested in the punk movement. I was a blues guy: I liked Motown, James Brown.

Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.

I started playing guitar at, like, 12 or 13 and just rock bands mostly. I had a punk rock band and hard core bands and all that.

Looking back on the production of 'Nevermind,' I'm embarrassed by it now. It's closer to a Motley Crue record than it is a punk rock record.

Punk was never about one particular clean-cut imagery... it's about many, many individuals coming very loosely together.

I was in bands, but they were punk bands, and you plug in the guitars, you turn them up really loud, you've got four or five other people on stage with you, you've got some protection from when they throw lighters. You can always hide behind the lead singer or the bass player.

When I met Apple, I made it very clear that I am an old punk and I have never done commercials or been sponsored. And I wasn't after their money.

I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a 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.

When I was a teenager, you couldn't get straight pants. Then in '76, when punk started to hit, it was a revelation that you could find straight pants again.

When I was a kid I listened to a lot of punk music, but then along came Orange Juice, ... They really broadened my musical perspective. They were self-deprecating and had a great sense of humor. And they sounded like Velvet Underground meeting Al Green. They called themselves 'the sound of young Scotland,' a play on Motown's 'Sound of Young America.'

When I was a kid, my influences were just my early friends' punk rock bands and listening to the radio,

Art talk is punk. Let the movie do your speaking for you.