Subversive Music Quotes

Punk rock is just another word for freedom.

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.

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 make music to make you sick of fake music, hate music like devil worshippin Satan music. So say your prayers, your Hail Marys and Jesuses. Take two sticks, tape 'em together and make a crucifix.

I think a whole lot of stuff gets by people - I could name half a dozen groups that do songs that are openly supportive of experimentation with drugs, nobody ever said anything to them.

Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion.

In the early '90s, it felt like there was space - there was like an empty feel. There was nobody really doing this. Maybe the Pixies were, a little bit. Their lyrics were also disjointed, more psychosexual or something. That's part of youth, too, maybe, that you just feel like you're doing something different.

It wasn't just music in The Ramones: it was an idea. It was bringing back a whole feel that was missing in rock music – it was a whole push outwards to say something new and different. Originally it was just an artistic type of thing; finally I felt it was something that was good enough for everybody.

As a late teenager, the punk movement pushed me further. In particular, the Clash, which happened to leak through the time of disco, showed me that there was this cross-cultural sound that could cut across genres and audiences. Like punk was to disco, rap music was a rebellion against R&B, which had adopted disco and made it worse.

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

That era in the late '80s through the '90s was really when the music was so new, fresh, energetic, but still creative. It hadn't quite gotten corporatized yet.

You can communicate a sad message or perplexing message through happy chords or a happy melody, and I hope to have the listener pose more questions in their life as opposed to going along with the everyday and what's being pushed on them.

Rock'n'roll is not red carpets and MySpace friends, rock'n'roll is dangerous and should piss people off

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

I have been listening a lot to The Carpenters and Neil Diamond, Elton John, and thinking, like, 'God, it'd be great to write a sort of subversive, alternative ballad,' like Lou Reed does so well with 'Perfect Day.' And I really loved 'Video Games' - at the time, it hadn't really got as big, but it's a classic song; you can't deny it.

In many ways, I have no idea what would have become of me if punk hadn't happened, because the '70s turned out to be so stale, and so boring, and so backward compared to what had come just before. We were too young to have fully experienced the '60s and the fervor of the anti-war movement.

I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it.

You had bands like D.O.A., or Black Flag, and a whole network opened up to trailblazer a counter culture movement. I'm more interested in the less sensational type of stories.

As far as bands doing that in a way where they think they're going to fight the government, the only people they're really hurting is the fans.

Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' - that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness.

What people don't understand is when punk started it was so innocent and not aware of being looked at or being a phenomenon and that's what everyone gets wrong. You can't consciously create something that's important, it's a combination of chemistry, conditions, the environment, everything.

Entertainment is about telling everybody that everything is alright but music is on the side of the upsetters and that's where I'm at.

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. Fuck you.

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages.

By wrecking something, it's always reinventing. All modern movements in art and music wrecked what came before, in a way - and surprised the cooler generation that was one step ahead. That's how you get ahead.