Justice & Law Quote by Greg Ginn

Violence clings to this memory like feedback: not glamorous, not mythic, not “controversial” in the way rock history likes to sell it back to you. Greg Ginn is swatting away the easiest narrative first - that the riots were a stunt, a branding strategy, a punk version of P.T. Barnum. “It certainly wasn’t some publicity thing” reads like a preemptive defense against an industry and a media ecosystem that treats chaos as content, then blames artists for the mess it profits from.

The more revealing line is the one about being “under attack from many of the police departments.” Ginn frames the state as an active antagonist, not a neutral force responding to disorder. In the early LA hardcore era, shows weren’t just rowdy; they were policed as if they were political threats, with clubs pressured, kids harassed, and whole scenes choked off. “We couldn’t play in LA for many years” isn’t a tour anecdote, it’s an account of cultural containment: a city deciding which youth cultures get to exist in public.

“I was afraid for many years” punctures the pose punk is expected to maintain. Fear isn’t supposed to be part of the legend, but it’s the real price of being treated like an enemy. The closing note - “A lot of people got very cynical” - lands like the aftershock. When every gig is a potential crackdown and every headline assumes you asked for it, idealism curdles into survival instincts. The subtext: scenes don’t just burn out; they get worn down.