Quotes About Punk

Everyone thought in the early days of punk, certainly once English punk got going, and even American punk, everyone thought it was a horrible right-wing Nazi thing—violent, racist, and against everything good in life.

Hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I'm saying? Punk actually couldn't take a good challenge.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS: I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the ass.

Mass movements are always so unhip. That's what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

So there developed another kind, more of a lumpen hippie, who really came from an abused childhood—from parents that hated them, from parents that threw them out. Maybe they came from a religious family that would call them sluts or say, "You had an abortion, get out of here" or "I found birth control pills in your purse, get out of here, go away." And those kids fermented into a kind of hostile street person. Punk types.

Hey, Lula said to Ranger's man.You want to watch it? I just had my hair done. I don't need plaster in it. Next time just shoot a hole is this punk-ass loser, will you?

He hated crowds, never liked punk. He couldn't handle the nakedness of the rage -his own so sophisticated and finely tuned. He could never see the similarity between himself and Donnie Draino screaming into a mic.

I'm creative. I can't relax unless I've got some project on the go. I'm somebody from art school, and art school during the punk era, when you just had a go at whatever came along.

When I was fifteen, I used to run around reading 'Adbusters' and dumpster diving, trying to find ways to make the U.S. government unwind into chaos through hardcore punk and metal.

I didn't know how to dance, so I just jumped up and down and bashed people. Then everybody else started doin' it, but they didn't get it right, so I quit.

I was so upset with what was going on in the world. I just couldn't stand the idea of being people tortured and that we even had such a thing as war. I hated the older generation, who had not done anything about it. Punk was a call-to-arms for me.

You look at somebody like Thurston Moore. Is he a noise dude? A punky dude? Is he a free jazz dude? He's a stimulation chaser, and I relate to that.

The least punk thing I ever did was open a money market account. Blue chip stocks. Mutual funds. They're a very safe and dependable way to grow your money long-term.

It's funny I'm talking to 'Rolling Stone' right now, because back then, it was like, 'Punk rock? Put it back. It's just a flash in the pan.'

When punk came along, I found my generation's music. I grew up listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, 'cause that was what got played in the house. But when I first saw the Stranglers, I thought, 'This is it.'

What they're not doing is marketing the Dead Kennedys in the spirit of what the band stood for.

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.

When that punk strain came to Britain and infected everyone. It was more than just a sound. There was an ethos, an ethic that went with it.

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

I felt like a punk who'd gone out to buy a switchblade and come home with a small neutron bomb. Screwed again, I thought. What good's a neutron bomb in a streetfight?

You see, dear reader, so much of what's doled out as punk merely amounts to saying I suck, you suck, the world sucks, and who gives a damn which is, er, ah, somehow insufficient. Don't ask me why; I'm just an observer, really. But any observer could tell that, to put in in terms of Us vs. Them, saying the above is exactly what They would want you to do, because it amounts to capitulation.

Hip hop has the urgency and rebelliousness that early rock n' roll and punk had: a level of rule-breaking and flirtation with danger. It allows you to break the rules.

When I've met people that work in any walk of life they say, "If it wasn't for punk I wouldn't be doing it this way." I think spiritually, it did change the world a lot.

I came out of the punk era in the late Seventies. There were the Stray Cats, Matchbox and myself. I was able to hang on and it makes you think how I fitted in with your Spandau Ballets and Kraftwerk.