Art & Creativity Quote by Greg Ginn

It is, in its plainspoken way, a punk origin story that refuses the usual romance. Greg Ginn frames himself not as a born rocker swept up by inspiration, but as a builder who stumbled into a marketplace booby-trapped with its own rules. The first move is credibility: he’s not naive about work, money, or logistics. He’s engineered products, shipped them, survived on the unglamorous discipline of making things function. That matters because it undercuts the stereotype of the musician as helplessly “artistic” and therefore destined to be exploited.

Then comes the pivot: “but the music business was completely new.” The subtext isn’t just inexperience; it’s culture shock. The music industry isn’t “business” in the straightforward, rational sense that an electronics shop might be. It’s gatekeepers, payola lore, relationships disguised as contracts, and a distribution maze that decides what even gets heard. When Ginn says he knew nothing about distribution, he’s naming the real power center: not the stage, not the studio, but the pipeline. Who presses the records, who stocks them, who promotes them, who controls access to audiences.

Contextually, this lands right in the DIY logic that defined early hardcore. The scene didn’t just sound different; it built alternative infrastructure because the existing one didn’t want them. Ginn’s admission reads less like self-deprecation than a quiet manifesto: if you want independence, you have to learn the boring parts. Punk wasn’t only a style; it was a supply chain.