TOW #4: IRB "Please Kill Me"

Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk, is exactly as its name would imply. It is an oral history, written through alternating interviews with first hand witnesses of the punk movement, that captures the crazed, strung out, nihilistic conundrum of the 1970s punk movement. The book, written by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, gains credibility through the fact that its central narratives are told by the narrative's subject's themselves, as interviewed by McNeil and McCain, who are also first hand participants of the movement as writers for Punk and Spin magazines. The book begins by following the eclectic projects of Andy Warhol in the late 1960s, as he launched the first wave of avant garde counter culture with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground. The book then proceeds to follow various famous (and infamous) punk figures such as Iggy Pop, Jim Morrison and the Ramones from Hippy and Beatnik culture to the advent of punk, showing the reader the unbelievable dysfunctionality that enabled punk to gain its iconic insanity.
The book, written with a sense of 20-20 hindsight by those who were making extremely bad decisions in their punk youth, is written for those who were involved in the time period as well as the new youths whose vices are relatively mild compared to those of the punk era. With this audience in mind, the authors intend to show to the reader that this defining era in pop culture was born out of dissidence, chaos, and no real unifying movement. The authors prove this through their style of using juxtaposed polarizing opinions of those they have interviewed to show how there was no order during the time. For example, when speaking on the unhinged lifestyle of Doors frontman Jim Morrison, some acquaintances of had extremely opposing opinions on the famed musician. Ray Manzarek, Doors keyboardist fondly said "Jim was a shaman" (McNeil McCain 31), while (juxtaposed directly below Manzarek's opinion) record executive Danny Fields said "Jim Morrison was a callous asshole, an abusive, mean person" (McNeil McCain 31). Through this inclusion and juxtaposition of a spectrum of views on the punk era, the authors reveal how the punk movement was less of a movement and more of a gathering of extremely different groups with one common love of chaos. Thus, the authors effectively prove their purpose that the punk era was extremely chaotic and disconnected.