The first Decline I did was out of sheer love and appreciation for the music. In 1977, it was more about bands, because punk was a new form of music. It was groundbreaking and political.
When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad's blues. It's music from the underground, and it's real, and it's written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.
I came out of UCB and, before that, punk rock, and the whole deal was you do it yourself. Get up and rent the space, get up and press your own records, get up and silkscreen your own tees, get it done yourself. That sort of self-reliance will only serve me. Any time I lose sight of that, my career suffers.
When we started to do punk, we put all of these things together to create the look of an urban guerrilla - a rebel.
When it comes to electronic music, I started listening to a lot of Daft Punk, way before I knew what house music was, and then progressed into a lot of Steve Angello, Eric Prydz, Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, and Laidback Luke.
Portland is a place where you can find a community as a feminist, a vegan or a fat activist. Artists, musicians, knitters, and filmmakers can all meet like-minded souls. It's proved the perfect place for me and all my punk friends.
Punk will never be dead to me. It's my life. I can never just drop this lifestyle. It embodies me.
The funniest thing happened in one of my first scenes. In the beginning Emma was really arrogant and punk and in every scene she would slam the door when she walked in or out.
I don't think I would do a straight late-night talk show, like a 'Tonight Show' kind of thing. But I'm open to whatever is done well. I don't have any agenda. I'm not like Fugazi - I'm not trying to be just so punk rock until I die. Whatever is funny is good.
Musically, New York is a big influence on me. Walk down the street for five minutes and you'll hear homeless punk rockers, people playing Caribbean music and reggae, sacred Islamic music and Latino music, so many different types of music.
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.
I went to school in Gainesville because it was a huge punk and folk town. So I went to class twice a week, and then I went to shows and wrote. I did a lot of music writing before I actually started playing music.
I went through so many phases when I was young - surfer girl, tom boy, punk - but they weren't mistakes, just moments.
I do fear for the generations of people who came of age thinking that pop-punk is what punk is, and that all the rebellion you need is just to stick your tongue out in the mirror every once in a while.
I created Punk for this day and age. Do you see Britney walking around wearing ties and singing punk? Hell no. That's what I do. I'm like a Sid Vicious for a new generation.
Thank you for the music, Sleater-Kinney. This gang of three was the best American punk rock band ever. Ever.
I heard opera all day long. From the time I was 9 years old, I was imitating the singers; later I studied opera. But we also got Western television and radio, from the Americans in West Berlin. When I was 11 years old, I turned into a hippie and gave flowers to policemen. And when I was 21 and left Berlin for London, I became a punk.
Punk has always been about doing things your own way. What it represents for me is ultimate freedom and a sense of individuality.
When I went to record my first album, which should have been a punk album, there was a synthesiser in the control room. I'd never seen one before but they let me have a go on it and I loved it to bits.
When I look at it now, the whole punk thing is sort of comedy in a weird way.
When punk rock came along, the one thing you were not supposed to be was musical.
I come from the home-grown punk ethic, where it doesn't matter if you can't play a note, it's how you communicate.
There weren't a lot of career opportunities in crazy-fast hardcore punk, so you didn't have a lot of ambition, just the love and passion to play music with your friends.
I started an all-girl punk band when I was 14, and I was the drummer, not the singer.
My son has followed fashion since he was a punk. He and I agree that fashion is about sex.
It was always kind of sad when your favorite punk rockers, like Jello Biafra or someone, would say they hate something you like. It was, 'Oh, I thought we were on the same page.'
I love punk rock, but I also love metal.
Barry White, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield are big influences for me. But I'm also a metal head. I was in a bunch of punk rock bands. The Bee Gees, hip-hop and the Beach Boys are just as much of an influence on me as Smokey.
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.
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.
Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
And I used to go the punk clubs such as a gay club in Poland Street that everyone would go to because it was the only place you could go to looking like that without getting beaten senseless.
I change my style maybe every month. I'm, like, punk one month, ghetto fab the next, classy the next. I'm just young and finding out who I am.
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.
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.
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.