I still love it. I love lots of other music, too, and always have, but punk's the soundtrack of my youth. I think you never escape the music you're listening to and seeing when you're seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old.
When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.
I will always consider myself a punk because of those experiences in high school. It will always be a part of me.
I was just a music lover who wondered what it would sound like if Otis Redding strapped on a guitar and played in a punk band. That's it.
Growing up in the suburbs, I used to listen to punk rock, Brand New, Taking Back Sunday. And no one from my high school listened to it.
I would say there's a lot of similarity between folk and punk. It's written for the common man.
Daft Punk's 'One More Time' remains one of my favorite 'getting ready to go out tonight' songs.
I'm partial to slouchier, more free clothing. My icon is Patti Smith, so the more rips, the more punk, the more comfortable I feel.
The fashion I've acquired over the years is so sacred to me - from costumes to couture, high fashion to punk wear I've collected from my secret international hot spots. I keep everything in an enormous archive in Hollywood.
We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.
I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great, the hamburger was terrific, and they had a doctor who made house calls.
Jazz is more raw than punk in a lot of ways. It's so expressive. A lot of people say to me, especially older people, 'It took me ages to get into jazz.'
Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool.
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.
I was always into punk, ever since I was 13, but I was into other stuff, too - like, well, the Spice Girls. I really liked Scary Spice.
I played in a punk rock band in high school called the High Heel Flip Flops. I was the drummer. I played drums for, like, four years.
Punk rock wasn't a career choice. It was a hobby that we did for fun. We never thought we'd get as big as our idols in T.S.O.L. or certainly not the Ramones.
I want people to focus on listening, not the image. And I want to play to everyone: rednecks, dubstep kids, punk rockers, and people who like as-real-as-it-gets country music.
