What is punk rock? Well, when I was a young punk in ’82, the older heads would say to me that PUNK IS A STATE OF MIND! At first, I thought they were fucking with my head, trying to be all deep, but a year or so later I started to figure out where they were coming from. It really was not about the color of your hair, what band t-shirt you wore, or what punk rock gang you belonged to. It was about being who you wanted to be on all levels. It was about living D.I.Y because you have no choice. The South Bay punks were some of the punks to really be on to that shit – they were like, “we are not going to buy into what Punk Society is telling us to be.” Just look at Black Flag – by ’82 they looked like hippies but were changing the game with the type of music they were creating. What made them even more punk then was the energy they put into their label SST. They gave a musical home to all sorts of weirdos, from The Minutemen, Hüsker Dü, St. Vitus, Meat Puppets, Bad Brains, and Sonic Youth. This brings me to this point…check out this rad documentary, 20 Years of Sonic Youth. Trust me, this is a pretty epic film that paints a vivid picture of a band that has created its own lane in music.
