Quotes About Punk

Picciotto recalled when he was a teenager writing to obscure English punk bands like Rudimentary Peni, Dead Wretched, and Blitz. "Those fuckers wrote us back, and it blew my mind," recalls Picciotto. "It was so cool to feel that connection. I've always kept that in mind. If someone writes you, you send them a letter back. It's just a cool thing to do.

We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you're signing a contract because you don't trust the other person to live up to their word

None of us ever imagined that the band was a job," Albini continues. "The band was always a diversion. It seemed unrealistic to think that we could make a living out of it. So we didn't even entertain those notions." "We didn't want to save the world," Riley concludes. "We just wanted to play in a punk rock band.

Punk in small towns in '88, '89 was just too dangerous to the normal way of doing things," Lunsford explains. "We found out how many walls there were in this free society that were blocking self-entertainment.

The band members were outspoken about their distaste for conformism, especially within the post-punk scene, where bands were already tailoring their music to contrived images, threatening to reverse punk's hardwon gains. "It's so much style over content

Fired up by the punk explosion, they wrote their first song—"Storming Tarragona." Named after the down-at-heel housing development where Boon lived, the song was about tearing down the projects and building real houses for people to live in. Boon and Watt, it turned out, had a powerful populist streak. "D. Boon didn't think our dads got a fair shake," Watt says, "and I think he was kind of railing against that ever since.

the cover of Land Speed Record is a photo of the coffins of the first eight soldiers killed in Vietnam; like many punks, the members of Hüsker Dü actually agreed with Sixties counterculture values but despised the hippies for selling out those values. "We're doing the same thing that the peace movement did in the Sixties," Mould said, "but the way they did it didn't work.

That was Black Flag: when you lose your shit

The greatest thing about punk rock for me, as an outsider, was that the concept that you had to be allowed in was no longer valid. You could be operating in a vacuum, you could be as fucked up an individual as you cared to be, and if you did something of worth, all these external conditions were immaterial.

Gordon was an artist who simply transferred her highly refined aesthetic skills to rock music, a genre that, as punk proved, required a sensibility more than chops anyway.

The most punk rock thing about J's stuff was how much he mixed all his influences

No one could explain why a punk would ever follow any mainstream rule about how many songs you could put on a single.

no careerist goals whatsoever. "I don't think any of us wanted to be rock stars," says Miller. "That was what I thought punk had set out to do—to get rid of rock stars.

For a while, there effectively was no underground. "I thought that was the end of what you might call punk rock," says Peter Prescott, "because punk rock is unique and individual and is not for everybody. So almost by definition it can't be popular.

MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. "I've always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it's a family kind of thing

Someone told me you were worshipping the devil with the punk rocks! he said, opening the jug. Ma walked into the apartment, and Grandpa repeated that I'd joined the devil-worshippers. With the punk rocks, he added proudly, liked he'd copped on to a new phenomenon.

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.

I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14, and I was the drummer, not the singer.

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.

We definitely were a punk band. When we got in with our producer, Richard Gottehrer, he slowed everything down so that you could actually hear what Belinda was singing.

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

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.

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

I love country music, blues, and punk, and one day I might make those kinds of records.