Top 1200 Punk Rock Quotes & Sayings

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.

The music industry went through such a strange stretch in 1977, especially in this country, with the whole punk rock thing coming about. Punk was rebellious-and justified in that response-but it had very little to do with music, and so it created a highly-charged but frighteningly floundering atmosphere that I found very, very disheartening. Musical quality for me has always been an important part of rock'n'roll-and winning recognition for that has long been an uphill battle all the way. Punk seemed like rock'n'roll utterly without the music.

Stray thought for the day: Putting boundaries on how punk should sound/look is the least punk rock thing one can do. Be yourself=Very punk.

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 certainly didn't want to be in a punk rock band, because I had already been in a punk rock band. I wanted to be in a band that could do anything - like Led Zeppelin.

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.

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?

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.

People who like progressive music tend to sneer at the idea of a kind of punk aesthetic, and people who like alternative indie rock or punk rock tend to sneer at what they see as the pretentiousness and pomposity of progressive music.

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.

Music is music; you can't change rock and say well this is punk rock and this is acid rock or rockabilly.

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!!'

1991 for some people was a significant year in terms of punk rock. It was the year "punk broke".

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.

Woody Weatherman showed me two beats, the "do do dat, do do dat" rock beat and the "ooh at ooh at ooh at" punk beat and other than that I was pretty limited. I had just gotten a drum kit for Christmas, which I was stoked about so I was ready to go. Back then, the prerequisite for playing punk rock drums wasn't very high, it was really pretty generic as I'm sure you can imagine.

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'

I had to get a driver's license and drive to St. Louis to find the punk-rock scene that was happening there. And there was a punk-rock scene. It was sweet. It was real. It was like everywhere else in the county. It was a handful of people who were feeling the same pull, and, of course, it was like the Island of Misfit Toys in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer [1964]. Just the freaks, the fags, the fat girls, the unbelievable eccentrics .

I was pretty much into punk rock and that's all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.

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.

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

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.

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

Prog-rock and concept records and some ambitious projects were kind of anathema post-punk. They were destroyed with the advent of punk rock. You don't necessarily need to have a degree in music composition to play in a rock band anymore, which is a great thing.

In between 15 and 20 - probably at around 17 - my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didn't get to when I was younger.

Punk rock and straight edge will always be married together. As far as me integrating that with wrestling, I learned a lot from punk rock.

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

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.

Punk was key to the early part of me playing guitar. I was really into melodic punk-rock. I related to punk more than Lynyrd Skynyrd or Yes or Van Halen.

There's a punk-rock attitude, clearly, to 'Hated.' There's even a punk-rock attitude to 'The Hangover,' I think. We start the movie with a Glenn Danzig song.

I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.

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.

I never thought of punk rock as the absolute act of rebellion for the sake of rebellion. There's a lot of that in there, but for me I think punk rock was always about questioning things and making decisions for yourself, which is a great message to pass on to your kids.

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.

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.

I just love music. Every genre of music: country, rock. I originally first loved punk rock. Pop punk. I don't know, just rock in general. And getting to rap. And now K-pop. Different types of music. I love everything.

We take a lot of inspiration from punk rock and early rock 'n' roll from the '50s and early '60s.

I feel like I'm a rock artist. I don't feel like I'm a pop artist. And I'm alt rock. I'm indie rock. I'm punk rock. Because it comes from the pots and pans. It's a lot of me, but I've got multiple personalities.

The 1970s was probably the most exciting decade to be a teenager, from discovering Little Richard at the end of the 1960s to glam rock to punk rock to electro music. So much happened in that 10-year span. There were so many musical revolutions. Some were happening at the same time. You had disco going on behind punk. You had Michael Jackson. You had the Sex Pistols.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn't get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn't interested in having to follow.

I remember being really young - being 13 or 14 - when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, 'Don't ever not be punk. Don't ever not be punk.' Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. 'Goon Squad' provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out 'The Who,' which was my absolute favorite band.

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.

Look at me... look at me... I need the attention, oooh I'm punk rock I got some tattoos, I got some piercings. If I'm gonna get some piercings then I want everyone to see it...I don't need to advertise my punkness. A real punk doesn't need to show off...Its like a Karate man... the Karate man bleed on the inside. A real punk is punk on the inside.

Is punk rock really music, or is it really just an attitude? I get into that discussion with people all of the time. I personally consider be-bop jazz to be punk rock. And prog rock would definitely fall in that category too.

Punk rock was the first thing I found in my life that made me feel acceptable. The thing that got me into punk rock was the idea, "You're fine just the way you are." It sounds kind of dorky, but you don't have to make excuses for who you are or what you do. When you find something like punk rock, not only is it okay to feel that way - you should embrace your weirdness. The world is totally messed up, and punk rock was a way to see that and work with it without candy-coating it. It was saying, "Yeah, the world is this way, but you can still do something about it. Take energy from that."

In between 15 and 20 - probably at around 17 - my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didnt get to when I was younger.

I don't think punk ever really dies, because punk rock attitude can never die.

Punk rock has never really had much patience with musical virtuosity. Actually, it'd be more accurate to say that for most of its history, punk has been actively hostile to virtuosity.

To begin with, the key principle of American indie rock wasn't a circumscribed musical style; it was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself. The equation was simple: If punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk. 'Punk was about more than just starting a band,' former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt once said, 'it was about starting a label, it was about touring, it was about taking control. It was like songwriting; you just do it. You want a record, you pay the pressing plant. That's what it was all about.'

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

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

Once I got into punk rock, I started mail-ordering albums, because a lot of the record stores in my area didn't carry the punk bands from England or Sweden or Chicago or Los Angeles

Rock and roll is not an instrument. Rock and roll isn't even a style of music. Rock and roll is a spirit that's been going since the blues, jazz, bebop, soul, R&B, heavy metal, punk rock and, yes, hip-hop.

People ask me: ‘What is punk? How do you define punk?' Here's how I define punk: It's a free space. It could be called jazz. It could be called hip-hop. It could be called blues, or rock, or beat. It could be called techno. It's just a new idea. For me, it was punk rock. That was my entrance to this idea of the new ideas being able to be presented in an environment that wasn't being dictated by a profit motive.

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

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.

Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.

There was a moment when Prince did rock & roll with a sponge-y seductive sound. I think that's what was in our head for 'Get On Your Boots.' But actually, the song is much more punk rock.

There is a community in hip-hop. It doesn't seem like that anywhere else, except maybe in punk rock. But punk rock is tricky, because it has become such a pop thing. But in rap, there is still a feeling of community. Who are our peers? Rappers.

The whole punk scene is, of course, responsible for the Go-Go's ever getting created. Because before punk rock happened, you couldn't start a band if you didn't know how to play an instrument. But when punk happened it was like, 'Oh, it doesn't matter if you can play or not. Go ahead, make a band.' And that's exactly what the Go-Go's did.