Top 100 Quotes About Punk Rock
#1. Punk [rock] seemed like rock 'n' roll music utterly without the music.
Steve Winwood
#2. DEVO was like the punk band that non Punk America saw as Punk and so when people who were really into Punk rock would be walking around on the streets the jocks who learned about Punk through Devo would roll down their windows and yell at the Punks: 'HEY, DEVO!!'
Thurston Moore
#3. Skating is what got me into punk rock.
Matt Skiba
#4. I am far from an "old" person in human terms, however I've spent over half my life immersed in the punk rock and hardcore community. I am not wholly defined by that as a person, but it is something that has been part of me for a long time.
Jacob Bannon
#5. A lot of people think that punk rock musicians don't know what they're doing.
Travis Barker
#6. When I was younger, I went through a lot of different phases. One day I'd be punk rock, and the next I would be tomboyish, and then I would be really girly. I was so weird. My two best friends and I were just crazy and goofy!
Ashley Benson
#7. Punk rock isn't something you grow out of Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is 'give us some truth'
Joe Strummer
#8. Lane and Zack got hitched. So while it might not be very punk rock to be too young to drink legally at your own wedding, it's certainly handy to have the thumbs up from God to get laid.
Jennifer Crusie
#9. I don't think punk ever really dies, because punk rock attitude can never die.
Billy Idol
#11. The whole point of the punk-rock thing was that "We're not special. We just have a voice."
Michael Stipe
#12. I played in Velvet Revolver, which is a raw, bombastic blues band with a punk rock edge to it. It's like everything is based around the blues, no matter what the groove is.
Scott Weiland
#13. Punk rock is very rebellious, of course, but it also means thinking for yourself.
Dexter Holland
#14. I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing.
Mike Watt
#15. I just think that playing bass, like punk rock bass with a pick, wasn't meant to be done for 25 years.
Kim Gordon
#16. My personal style is eclectic, I would say. I always like to mix and match things. Uh, but the thing is that it changes every single day. So if I'm feeling you know a little more rebellious, one day I may dress a little more punk rock. But most of the time I say, pretty consistently, I'm feminine.
Crystal Reed
#17. 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.
Todd Rundgren
#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. 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
#20. I've learned some of the greatest life lessons from growing up in the skate and punk rock communities.
Mark Hoppus
#21. Clothing that placed them somewhere along the hippy/anarchist/punk rock/funked-out artist continuum.
Cheryl Strayed
#22. This hair has a reputation of being stereotypically punk rock, and I'm the girliest person you'll ever find so it took a while for me to figure out how to convey my style. I never wear black very often anymore, all the colors I wear are extremely soft and lovely.
Ariana Grande
#23. Music never leaves you alone, and punk rock will always be there when nothing else will,
Pete Wentz
#24. 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
#25. Pledge Allegiance was a pretty generic name back in the day. In the 80's I was the promoter for all the punk rock shows and I'd book Black Flag, Dead Kennedy's, Minor Threat etc and I'd hook them up with places to stay if needed so it's hard to keep track of it all.
Reed Mullin
#26. 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
#27. You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.
Colin Meloy
#28. When I began to cover songs for YouTube, they all tended to be in the super pop-genre.. as in, smash-hit songs. My writing process was heavily influenced by this - I went from a more heavy punk rock style to straight up sugary-sweet pop.
Alex Goot
#29. 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.
Kurt Cobain
#30. I need punk rock. It's the medicine for me, but it's bitter and sickening. If you don't need it - if you're happy and healthy - run toward that.
Bradford Cox
#31. In high school I was good at math and everybody wanted me to do something with that - mathematics or engineering - which was a nightmare scenario for me. Meeting other artists and going to punk rock shows at that age, there was a feeling of freedom and community that I wanted to partake in.
Laura Owens
#32. '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
#33. 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
#34. It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.
James Marsters
#35. The popularity of punk rock was, in effect, due to the fact that it made ugliness beautiful.
Malcolm McLaren
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. You know what's punk rock about marriage? Nothing. You know what's punk rock about marriage? All the puke and shit and piss.
Jenny Offill
#40. What are you doing tonight?" he asked, as soon as I was sitting down.
"Nothing," I said. I had what most people would call a boring social life, a classical holdout in a punk rock world.
E.K. Johnston
#41. When I was growing up, I fetishised New York City. It was the land of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, it was where Leonard Cohen wrote 'Chelsea Hotel', it was CBGBs and all the punk rock clubs. Artists and musicians lived there, and it was cheap and dangerous.
Moby
#42. 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
#43. I'd always wanted to make a record with Jim Dickinson, and I'd known about his boys for years, ... He reminded me that when they were 13 or 14 years old they had a punk rock band and I'd called him and wanted to make a record with them then.
John Hiatt
#44. 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
#45. Punk rock seemed to make sense. I was listening to The Clash and I really loved their social messages and they have a great history of fighting racism.
Justin Sane
#46. Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.
Stanley Crouch
#47. Emo: e-mo 1. A much-maligned, mocked, and misunderstood term for melodic, expressive, and confessional punk rock.
Andy Greenwald
#48. Because the only thing that punk rock should ever really mean, is not sitting 'round and waiting for the lights to go green
Frank Turner
#49. It's really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70's. I wish there would be one big change like that again, but I don't know if that'll ever happen.
Penelope Spheeris
#50. It's exciting to be able to do something completely independent without anybody challenging it, and it's a big part of the reason why I'm enjoying doing the stand-up comedy, is I'm able to go out and interact with people one-on-one after the show. It's very punk-rock.
Tom Green
#51. If there's one thing that differentiates me from the rest of my family it's the rock element. I hung out with friends who like punk rock a lot. Not getting a big record deal, and having a hard time for years, it means you have to prove yourself and scratch your way up from nothing.
Martha Wainwright
#52. To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.
Patti Smith
#53. Science is very vibrant. There are always new observations to be found. And it's all in the interest in challenging the authority that came before you. That's consistent with the punk rock ethos that suggests that you should not take what people say at face value.
Greg Graffin
#55. 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
#56. People perceive punk rock in the sense of Sid Vicious, all strung-out, crazy and insane.
Hayley Williams
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. The problem is we moved to LA ... The only way to be punk rock in L.A. is to be a Republican.
Trey Parker
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. Punk rock is just another word for freedom.
Patti Smith
#63. San Francisco, America's B-movie imitation of Paris. San Francisco, the city that ruined punk rock. San Francisco, the most intolerant place in the country.
Jim Goad
#64. (Like a lot of middle-class kids, I needed my punk rock and rebellion underwritten by my parents.)
Carrie Brownstein
#65. [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
#66. 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
#67. (Punk rock is) lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.
Lester Bangs
#68. 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
#69. As a child there was no place for adventure or experimentation. I guess that kind of freedom started in high school with punk rock. That's what enlightened me to not being afraid to express myself.
Mark McNairy
#70. Inevitably, as much as we loved punk rock, our noise was coming from a slightly different place.
David First
#71. It makes me extremely proud to make punk rock the biggest music in the world right now.
Mike Dirnt
#72. And all I could do while I listened to this dude tell me how punk rock saved his life was think, Wow. Why did my friend waste all that time going to chemotherapy? I guess we should have just played him a bunch of shitty Black Flag records.
Chuck Klosterman
#73. Punk rock really influenced me, the basic metal bands, Zeppelin, Stones and Floyd, and Southern rock bands. I think I was pretty well-rounded.
Al Jourgensen
#74. It's funny; we never had anything like credibility. Even though we all have some sort of punk-rock background, but so what? I really don't care about that. What's credibility anyway? Who has credibility?
Mark McGrath
#75. 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.
Greg Graffin
#76. The period right before punk rock where people like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop were really strong.
Arto Lindsay
#77. Los Angeles is a true postmodern city. Here, we celebrate with equal aplomb the high and the low. I am just as influenced by the punk rock attitude of local skate and surf cultures as I am by old-school glamour and stardust.
Liz Goldwyn
#78. 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.
Billie Joe Armstrong
#79. There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.
John Cusack
#80. The word bollocks seems strong, punk rock, and imposing, but in reality, bollocks is always too tame to make much of an impact.
Jennifer Harrison
#81. I came up from growing up with a lot of Catholic guilt, a lot of punk rock, hipster guilt in the later years where I think people have thrown a lot of things on me. Where I always felt like I'm not supposed to tell the horn section what to play or I don't want to come off egotistical.
Jack White
#82. 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.
Brandon Thomas
#83. I stop and think what they call 'punk rock' today ... give me a break! Let me know when they can walk in the vapor trail of Little Richard, which was punk. You've got a gay black guy with a pompadour singing about tutti frutti with your white girl? F-k you!
Ted Nugent
#84. I love dancing, but I'm not that good of a singer. I sang in punk rock bands in high school and college and stuff, but that mostly involved lots of screaming.
Brian Dietzen
#85. Soccer is like punk rock: The product is not necessarily terrible. The problem is the fan base.
Chuck Klosterman
#86. After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.
Craig Ferguson
#87. Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.
Kurt Cobain
#88. Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.
Rob Sheffield
#89. Punk is musical freedom. It's saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster's terms, 'nirvana' means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that's pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.
Kurt Cobain
#90. Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
Henry Rollins
#91. There's a punk rock quality to Peter Parker, that I identified with when I read the comics [Spider-Man], and that I really liked. He has this chip on his shoulder.
Marc Webb
#92. Dakota started laughing. You wouldn't have anything back there to help me tame a punk-rock wild child with a disdain for cowboys, would you?
Sara Humphreys
#93. 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
#94. Will punk rock ever die? Pal, if you have to ask it's dead to you.
Henry Rollins
#95. Triple 6 Mafia and Mystikal in Atlanta was one of my first shows. I remember how sweaty and smashed up everybody was, and it was so punk rock.
Yelawolf
#96. I was just a punk-rock kid who never played acoustic guitar.
Dave Pirner
#97. 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
#98. I never wanted to be part of any scene, I never wanted to be a part of anything, I wanted to do my own thing. Those are the lessons I learned from punk rock.
Buzz Osborne
#99. Punk rock will never die, until something more dangerous replaces it.
Jello Biafra
#100. I dropped out of high school and I couldn't go to college 'cause I wasn't smart enough, so I'd resigned myself to loading trucks and playing punk rock on the weekends.
Dave Grohl
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