Art & Creativity Quote by Mike Watt

Punk’s most durable trick was smuggling an ethic into a genre label, and Mike Watt is calling that bluff. By insisting punk “is not really a style of music,” he punctures the tidy retail version of rebellion: three chords, fast tempo, leather jacket, done. What he’s protecting is punk as an operating system - a way of moving through the world that can survive trend cycles, streaming categories, and the nostalgia-industrial complex that keeps selling “authenticity” back to us at a markup.

Watt’s phrasing matters. “Not really” is a musician’s understatement that lands like a dare: if you only hear punk as a sound, you missed the point. “State of mind” relocates punk from the record to the person, from product to posture. The subtext is DIY discipline, not chaos: make it yourself, distrust gatekeepers, keep it lean, stay answerable to your scene. That’s why punk can show up in disparate forms - hardcore, post-punk, noise, indie, even hip-hop - without losing its core voltage. The energy isn’t in the distortion; it’s in the refusal.

Context sharpens the claim. Watt comes out of the Minutemen and the Southern California ecosystem where punk wasn’t just aesthetic provocation, it was infrastructure: self-booked tours, zines, small labels, all-ages spaces. Saying punk is a mindset is also a quiet rebuke to museum-piece punk: the version frozen in 1977, polished for festival stages. Watt argues for punk as a living practice, measured less by how it sounds than by what it resists - complacency, professionalism-as-religion, and the idea that you need permission to speak.