Quote Of The Day By Patti Smith: 'Punk Is An Idea ...'

Patti Smith is revered as one of the most influential figures in rock music, although the nickname she has been given associates her with one genre in particular. Dubbed the "Godmother of Punk," the performer was born in Chicago on December 30, 1946, and raised in New Jersey, though it was when she relocated to New York in her early adulthood that she began to make an impact on the local music scene.

In particular, her combination of avant-garde songwriting techniques with stream-of-consciousness poetry expanded the possibilities of rock music, with her 1975 album "Horses" regarded as a landmark release that anticipated the rise of punk rock in the years that followed. Apart from a self-imposed break from the music industry starting around 1979 and lasting into the mid-1990s, she has remained a much-admired cult figure and released a diverse and boundary-pushing body of work.

Smith has made several notable connections with other rock royalty, including a decades-long friendship with Bob Dylan that began in 1975. She has explored a wide range of genres throughout her long career, but it is with the punk movement that she has been most closely associated, and her insights into the rebellious genre make her our Quote of the Day.

"Punk is an idea. It's freedom. And it'll be around 200 years from now for the people who want it."

Our Quote of the day comes from a 2008 interview Patti Smith gave to Spin magazine, looking back over a career in music that stretched back more than three decades at that point, but which now spans more than half a century. In it, she makes clear that she prefers not to be pigeon-holed, discussing how it was outside forces such as the media that dubbed her either a musician or a poet, or something in between.

It is clear from the interview that Smith herself requires the openness and freedom to produce art as she sees fit. And indeed, to her it seems that punk is more than just a genre of music or a passing fad. Instead, it is an ethos that itself fosters creativity for those who need it.

To those unfamiliar with the genre, the word "punk" may simply mean the abrasive, high-tempo, typically three-chord form of music that dominated the rock landscape in the late 1970s. But while that is undeniably the foundational period of purist punk rock — though there were several notable precursors to the genre — the truth is that punk can be taken as a blanket term, with a much broader meaning for both music and art in general.

At the center of the punk ethos is the belief that when it comes to making art, there are no rules or barriers to entry. Even a person who has never played a guitar has the right to pick one up and play something on it, which explains why much of what's typically called punk has a self-taught, DIY aesthetic to it.

Smith thinks of punk in this way, too, refusing to attach it to a particular subset of musicians or a certain place and time. The quote comes from her response to a question asking whether punk has "run its course," meaning whether it was over as a genre or mindset. But as Smith explains in the same answer: "Those kinds of ideas to me are ludicrous. I'm not a critic. I'm not a journalist. I'm not a philosopher. Arguing that punk has run its course is like saying painting ran its course after the Renaissance. There are kids out there you've never heard of who believe they're punk rock. And they're right."

• "I feel about politics the same way I do about religion: I find the best I can from different things."
• "I don't have an image of myself, when I'm walking down the street, like I'm a rock star or something. I'm a human being, I'm a friend, I'm a mom, I'm a writer, and I'm an artist."
• "When I recorded 'Horses' and went out into the world in '75, the thing I always told everybody was, 'Start your own band.' I met a drummer in the '70s when he was really a kid in Ireland and I said, 'Start your own band, you can do it.' He ended being in U2 later on."
• "The beauty of New York City for me was that people could come from all over — young people, people of any age — with ideas, with no money, but had creative instincts, or a plan, a design could come and get some cheap apartment, get a job at a bookstore as I did, and build their life. You can't do that anymore; it's a completely different economic structure."
• "The way our big cities change sucks. People should be careful because we are losing the creativity. The beauty of cities was that they were edgy, sometimes even a little dangerous. Artists, poets, and activists could come and unify and create different kinds of scenes."
• "Bad things are going to happen, but there's always going to be something great to think about and to write about. Your imagination will bring you things. The planets, or the full moon, or a really great book, or somebody has a cool movie out. You fall in love, or meet a really neat person. There's a million reasons to live."