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Punk Rock Quotes

Browse 224 quotes about Punk Rock.

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Punk Rock Quotes

“Musicians are our real teachers. They are opening us up politically with their lyrics and creatively with experimental, psychedelic music. They share their discoveries and journeys with us. We can’t travel far, no one I know has ever been on an aeroplane. ... whatever they experience, we experience through their songs. It’s true folk music — not played on acoustic guitar by a bearded bloke — but about true-life experiences.”

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Book:Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
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“Big Jason walked into the club, stared at the band beginning their sound check and quickly walked over to the bar. Lily looked up from her rinsing and smiled. "Big Jason Gulliver, back in town. Raquel said Godzilla returned to Tokyo, I wondered how soon you'd drop by here". "Front me a soda, Lily. How's the night club racket?" Jason barked over the noisy band. "Guys still hitting on me, including your stupid friend King Steve", Lily shot a jet of soda pop from her beverage gun into a water glass. Jason chortled. "He's slow on the draw. You're a fuckin' dyke but a cool fuckin' dyke. I don't even care if you sleep with my girl". "Why thank you, Caveman", Lily smiled, handing him the soda with a cherry on top.”

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Book:Every Bitch For Himself
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“And so you go out with a girl and you’re driving… “So what are you reading right now?” “Well, I’m not much of a reader…” *screeching car brakes* “I’M NOT MUCH OF A DINNER BUYER! GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!” “But we’re lost in the stucco sprawl of L.A.” “I DON’T CARE!” But every once in a while you meet the one who reads… “So what are you reading?” he asked (you know, the date killer question)…“So what are you reading?” “Well I’m right in the middle of a book right now--” Oh my god, she’s in the middle of a book. Be still my beating heart. “So what are you reading?” he asked expectantly, nerves tingling, body aquiver “Well, I’m in the middle of this Harry Potter b—” *screeching car brakes* “DON’T BE AN ADULT WOMAN WHO READS A FUCKING CHILDREN’S BOOK IN MY CAR, GET THE FUCK OUT!”

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Author:Henry Rollins
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“My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.”

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Book:Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human
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“Ari [Up] hides nothing from our audiences: if she’s in a bad mood, she shows it, and if we happen to be on stage when she’s not happy, she just does a shit gig. There’s no You’ve paid money to see this so I’m going to give you a good time, or I’m not going to let the band down – she’s just grumpy and uncommunicative. This is a good thing in many ways, we’re against faking it, we tell it like it is. People in bands are just like the audience: they have good days and bad days, we’re not pantomime or theatre, we’re no different to anyone else. We don’t see ourselves as entertainers, trying to make the audience forget their troubles for forty minutes. We see ourselves as warriors. We’d rather people confronted their anger and dissatisfaction and did something about it. Like Luis Buñuel said, ‘I’m not here to entertain you, I’m here to make you feel uncomfortable.”

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Book:Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
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“FICTION is a series of unintended coincidence,confabulation,and quasi-lucid lying made plausible enough for an author and a reader to cohabitate for a secret, brief and sinful affair. Nothing is real.Except imagination~with a pinch of perception, and a dash of collusion used as the Clabber. Be So Advised.”

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Book:The Clabber Grrrl's Retreat: A Lurid Tale of Exotic Reptiles, Bloody Murder, and the Fine Art of Baking
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“Sid's quite awkward and talks in spurts like he thinks it's stupid to have a point of view, but he's got to communicate, so he forces the words out. I can see it's not that he's unsure of his opinions, he just thinks it's pathetic to have a strong opinion on any subject; to be intelligent means being able to see all sides.”

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Book:Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys
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“Pink electricity snakes out from her fingertips, jumping from the guitar and sending rainbow-hued sparks floating to the ceiling. She leans her hand to the strings and feels the chunky, percussive roar of the palm mute rumble through the amps. It gnaws at her bones, shakes her blood in her veins like some kind of fantastic, terrible cocktail of sound and iron, and she is so desperately happy.”

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Book:Blackpines: The Antlers Witch: The Light in Her Dreams
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“I think I've always been extremely conscious of the kind of empowerment that comes from realizing that you're in a position to express yourself. And the fact is that - and this is the thing about punk rock - that everyone is in a position to create culture, and that point has never been lost on me. To me, that's an important political aspect of doing this, and trying to live in a way that's about dialogue as opposed to like... spectacle.”

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Author:J. Robbins
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“I've never recognized 'emo' as a genre of music. I always thought it was the most retarded term ever. I know there is this generic commonplace that every band that gets labeled with that term hates it. They feel scandalized by it. But honestly, I just thought that all the bands I played in were punk rock bands. The reason I think it's so stupid is that - what, like the Bad Brains weren't emotional? What - they were robots or something? It just doesn't make any sense to me.”

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Author:Guy Picciotto
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“My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.”

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Author:Kathleen Hanna
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