Wealth & Money Quote by Greg Ginn

Ginn’s line carries the blunt impatience of someone who watched the music industry treat “permission” like a product. It’s not framed as a noble manifesto; it’s framed as a refusal to loiter at the gates of a business model built to keep most people outside. The key move is the shift from wanting (“give me money”) to doing (“we just started releasing records”). That “just” is doing a lot of work: it downplays the risk and labor to emphasize necessity. DIY isn’t presented as a lifestyle brand. It’s a survival tactic.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of how patronage works in popular culture. Labels don’t merely fund; they “tell me what to do,” flattening aesthetic choices into market choices. Ginn is defending autonomy, but he’s also acknowledging the trade: if you don’t take their money, you inherit every job they used to do, from pressing to distribution to promotion. “As best we could” admits the inevitable rough edges and constraints, and also turns those limitations into an aesthetic - the raw, hurried, anti-polish energy that punk audiences came to read as honesty.

Context matters: Ginn, as the engine behind Black Flag and SST Records, helped build an alternative infrastructure when major labels had little interest in hardcore punk. The quote isn’t nostalgia. It’s a blueprint: if the system won’t validate you, route around it, even if the result is messy. The mess is the point - proof that culture can be made without asking to be managed.