Quotes About Punk Rock Music

#1. I'm in a band. I don't go to church every Sunday. I love punk rock music. Sometimes I use swear words a lot. I respect and admire gay men and women. I'm obsessed with horror films. I know what shame feels like. And guess what old man? Jesus is still my Savior.

Hayley Williams

#2. Y'know, when I first started listening to punk rock music, I used to get my fucking ass kicked for it! I was known as a fucking freak! But now I'm amongst many many many freaks here with me tonight!
- Billie Joe Armstrong,Stay The Night, Reading Festival 2013

Green Day

#3. For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on 'Madden'.

Billie Joe Armstrong

#4. I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

Billy Childish

#5. Character isn't something you talk about; it's something you show through your actions-through your every day habits.

Brian Joyce

#6. The price of coming from a small town is that everyone knows your story. Your book has been read, shelved, dusted, and re-read by everybody.

Brian Joyce

#7. I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.

Reggie Watts

#8. Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it

Thurston Moore

#9. I listen to all kinds of bands. I like rock music, like, male rock bands. I'm more into that instead of female singers. I like Nirvana, Green Day, System Of A Down. I also like punk rock, and I love bands like Coldplay.

Avril Lavigne

#10. There's not much music I'll listen to if it doesn't have pretty heavy swing. Rhythm is so important. Punk rock would have more power and feeling if it had swing.

Greg Ginn

#11. 'Punk rock' is a word used by dilettantes and heartless manipulators about music that takes up the energies, the bodies, the hearts, the souls, the time and the minds of young men who give everything they have to it.

Iggy Pop

#12. I was a huge Bowie fan since I was 12 years old. That was the first 'punk' rock I got into in the Seventies. I didn't find out about a lot of the other stuff that was going on, like New York Dolls and Roxy Music, until a lot later.

Buzz Osborne

#13. Here is how the harmful becomes profitable: That which yesterday was reviled today ends up in Urban Outfitters. The critic Rebecca Solnit has summarized it this way: 'Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,' say the Sex Pistols. Now, we know where to buy the tray and what the heart tastes like.

Josh Kun

#14. People define themselves to some degree by the music that they listened to as teens. My mom had Elvis. Me, I had 'The Who' and later punk rock. Kids who came up in the '80s had other songs and bands. It's a way of placing ourselves culturally and temporally.

Jennifer Egan

#15. Music never leaves you alone, and punk rock will always be there when nothing else will,

Pete Wentz

#16. Dream-start with dream. Start tonight-become who you want-dream big!" He became animated at this point, "No money needed for dreams. Dreams are free.

Brian Joyce

#17. My whole view of music completely flipped over on its head. I grew up listening to punk rock, SST. I liked people that were making music that weren't necessarily very good at their instruments, it was more about the ideas they had than how well they could play and sing.

Doug Martsch

#18. A lot of punk rock. I listen to various stuff just cuz my friends now listen to a lot of different bands. I listen to a lot of underground stuff like jungle music.

Cassie Steele

#19. Popularity is like a girl in class that you can't ignore. She give you eyes when no one looks then turns to her friends and laughs some more.

Brian Joyce

#20. 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.

Imelda May

#21. If you ask me, rockabilly has had a raw deal for far too long. People never shunned the blues or jazz the way they do rockabilly. But it's the original punk-rock, and it changed the way people looked at music for ever.

Imelda May

#22. Punk was sort of an angry stance against things that had happened just before, against the pop of glam rock, against progressive rock. Music had become very staid and it was about the playing and people obsessed. Eric Clapton was God and we needed an enema within the art form, and punk did do that.

Gary Kemp

#23. I went to art school and never thought I'd be a musician, but then punk rock came along in the late 70s and kind of ruined my life. So I quit art school to get involved in music and I've been doing it ever since.

Michael Gira

#24. Well I listened to mostly rock music, and I felt like hip hop was like an extension of rock music when it was done well. So energetically, again I felt like it was in line with punk rock and maybe hard rock, more than it was in line with R&B, which I never really liked.

Rick Rubin

#25. When Punk Rock happened, it created an opening in the culture ... it made it ok to think you could play music, even though you had no musical training.

Kim Gordon

#26. I've been making electronic music for twenty some odd years but, because I grew up playing in punk rock bands, when I started touring, I thought in order to be a viable touring musician I had to do it with a band. I would DJ or tour with a full rock band.

Moby

#27. It's funny how books can change you. You open up a book and one minute you are who you've always been, then you read some random passage and you become someone else.

Brian Joyce

#28. [Country Music] is the final destination for many punk rockers [ ... ] Rockabilly is the mid-point and then [they] end up at Country [ ... ] There's purity to that music and I think that appeals to a lot of punk rock people - the precision, the purity, and the directness of Country Music.

John C. Reilly

#29. It makes me extremely proud to make punk rock the biggest music in the world right now.

Mike Dirnt

#30. The first time that I came to New York to work properly was the mid-'80s, but I was doing eight shows a week. You have no life. Going to a punk rock club - or whatever the music was at that time - would not have been on my agenda.

Alan Rickman

#31. I've played death metal, punk rock, hardcore, funk ... I've done it all. And all there really is music and at the end of the day, anybody who has a record and puts out a record that's basically the same song 13 times over on one record; to me they're just cheating the fans.

Cristian Machado

#32. 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

#33. Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.

Rob Sheffield

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

Kurt Cobain

#35. Punk [rock] seemed like rock 'n' roll music utterly without the music.

Steve Winwood

#36. There are moments in our lives that define the people we will become in the future, like a symptom before an ailment, or the catalyst before the cure.

Brian Joyce

#37. No one wants to die or even plans to die, at least not when you are young and living life on top of everything, stepping on gold, running the miles with hot chicks on tow, but even if I wasn't a rock star, and just a normal civilian, I still wouldn't plan to die young. Death is so boring.

Sofea Shah

#38. Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.

Stanley Crouch

#39. When I was growing up, I really liked punk rock. I liked the sort of people that played really powerful music that was pretty unassuming otherwise - people who didn't dress weird or do much theatrics.

Doug Martsch

#40. I kind of got into music in middle school, although at the time I didn't know it as punk music so much as just rock music.

Chris McCaughan

#41. Society gets by from the help of its citizens.

Brian Joyce

#42. You know-portraits are odd things." "How do you figure?" I asked. "Well at the time, that portrait told the whole story. It told the truth. We were a family-a happy family. Now that same portrait just looks like a lie.

Brian Joyce

#43. When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.

Frank Iero

#44. 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.

Hayley Williams

#45. I guess what's most important is that we chose to live with our hearts open and to let our experiences show us the way towards our brightest days.

Brian Joyce

#46. Like punk rock, like Jackson Pollock, like Jack Kerouac, it was truly human, a mix of perfect beauty and cathartic error.

Yann Martel

#47. We both young what made you grow younger."
"The music?"
He nodded and whispered. "You don't have to go back to being old. We'll practice all the time. We'll record albums and we'll tour.

David Agranoff

#48. 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

#49. Art is sacred.
Punk rock is freedom.
Expression and right to express is vital.
Anyone can be artistic.

Kurt Cobain

#50. What were we, but kids with apartments and jobs anyway?

Brian Joyce

#51. Punk is not just the sound, the music, punk is a lifestyle.

Green Day

#52. Hardcore without punk isn't music, it's a genre of porn. And punk isn't a genre of music, it's a thought process.

Dominic Owen Mallary

#53. Couples swayed and embraced to the beat as the singer's vocals soared above a group of confused teenagers and twenty-something's.

Brian Joyce

#54. Punk rock was the tsunami that threatened to drown us all in 1977.

Pete Townshend

#55. I guess it was only fitting that to them PUNK was a four letter word. However, to people like Dylan and I-punk was our hearts-our souls. We grew up with a lot of uncertainties. To be a teenager isn't always pretty, and our music reflected that.

Brian Joyce

#56. Me personally, I side more with punk rock bands. I grew up with The Misfits, The Dead Boys, The Damned, Dropkick Murphys, and early AFI. That was the stuff that really got me into music. Song writing wise, bands like Alkaline Trio were very important to me for beginning to write songs.

Andy Biersack

#57. Eventually, that feeling fades, but there is always the memory of those days. When you're young, everything is butterflies. What I mean is - it's all new. I guess he was telling you to still believe, to hold on to your butterflies.

Brian Joyce

#58. I've been trying to challenge myself to be more explicit. I've always liked punk rock and Sonic Youth. I make that music privately, but I've never released it.

Sufjan Stevens

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

Neko Case

#60. 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.

Thomas Bangalter

#61. My dad took me to all the best rock and punk shows when I was growing up and music has always been a part of my life. So I'm very interested in the music scene and I suppose that's why I've ended up going out with musicians. Dave Pirner is still one of my best friends.

Winona Ryder

#62. Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls.

Ian Astbury

#63. Style has always been very important to us. We grew up in the '70s. Music was glam rock, punk rock and a very stylish movement.

Nick Rhodes

#64. As a New Yorker you can't help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted 'Rhapsody in Blue' here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

Moby

#65. Christopher was wearing a suit and adorned make-up. As long as I had known him, he never wore a suit or make-up. The look of him defenseless to his appearance saddened me.

Brian Joyce

#66. When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.

Moby

#67. One thing that got me started on it was the jean jacket. It's an item that could make you believe you're in the 50s or punk-rock 70s or grunge 90s. I was really focused on timelessness, and I think music is very timeless.

Drew Barrymore

#68. Punk is just like any other sub culture or music. Straight rock music has those elements. I grew up in a place where the punk rock kids fed the homeless in the town square.

Justin Sane

#69. That night, he laid in his bed thinking about all the possibilities. They came like waves in his mind. At first they came slow, then gradually built up speed, cresting into full on dreams, until finally, they broke onto the shore with all of their reality. First dreams, then nightmares.

Brian Joyce

#70. In times such as these, life often begs us to seek answers when in reality there are only questions available.

Brian Joyce

#71. I was in lots of dodgy bands growing up and I always fancied myself in a band. But, you know, I was rubbish at writing music. So maybe one day I'll play a rock star, or punk rocker.

Gemma Arterton

#72. We weren't straight-A students. We didn't start playing until we were teenagers, and we started playing rock and roll and punk rock - power chords - before we ever thought we would play folk music. So virtuosity was just never in my reach.

Ketch Secor

#73. I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.

Michael Franti