![]() ![]() McNeil and McCain (Tilt) provide a vivid look at the volatile and needy personalities who created punk, if they do not offer perceptive musical or cultural analysis. Constructed as an oral history, the book weaves together personal accounts by the crucial players in the scene, many of whom seem to have been so drugged out most of the time that their reliability is questionable. Details of Iggy Pop's drug abuse and seedy sex with groupies receive more attention than important bands such as Television and Blondie, which had comparatively puritan lifestyles. Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and scores of other punk figures. But the book's take on punk rock as ""doing anything that's gonna offend a grown-up"" overemphasizes the self-destructive side of the movement. A contemporary classic, Please Kill Me is the definitive oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements. McNeil, one of the founding writers of the original 'zine, Punk, in 1975, is certainly qualified to tell this tale. Starting out with the electroshock therapy Lou Reed received as a teenager, working through such watersheds as the untimely deaths by overdose or mishap of Sid Vicious, Johnny Thunders and Nico, as well as the complicated sexual escapades of the likes of Dee Dee Ramone, the portrayal here of the birth of an alternative culture is intermittently entertaining and often depressing. Gillian McCain is a published poet and a former editor of the Poetry Project Newsletter. Legs McNeil is responsible for naming the movement punk and is the author of Yuppie like Me. ![]() As its sensationalist title suggests, this stresses the sex, drugs, morbidity and celebrity culture of punk at the expense of the music. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk de McNeil, Legs McCain, Gillian en - ISBN 10: 0349108803 - ISBN 13: 9780349108803 - Abacus. ![]()
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