Art & Creativity Quote by Greg Ginn

Ginn is laying down a heresy that only sounds mild if you forget how punk built its identity: speed, stiffness, refusal. By insisting on “pretty heavy swing,” he’s smuggling a black, dance-based rhythmic tradition into a genre that often treated groove like a guilty pleasure. The line isn’t nostalgia for jazz; it’s a demand that punk stop confusing urgency with emotional depth. Rhythm, for him, isn’t decoration - it’s the engine that makes aggression land in the body instead of just the ear.

The subtext is a critique of punk’s self-imposed austerity. Early hardcore, especially in its most militant forms, could become a kind of rhythmic puritanism: straight 4/4, relentless downstrokes, tempos so fast the beat turns into a blur. That works as politics and posture, but it can flatten feeling into pure velocity. Ginn’s provocation - “would have more power and feeling” - suggests that the missing ingredient isn’t volume or lyrical sincerity; it’s physical inevitability, the push-pull that makes listeners move.

Context matters: Ginn wasn’t just talking as a theorist. As Black Flag’s guitarist, he helped define hardcore’s serrated edge, yet the band also stretched into slower, heavier, more lurching grooves that alienated purists. His point reads like a defense of that evolution: swing as freedom. Not “let’s make punk polite,” but “let’s make it hit harder by letting it breathe.”