![]() ![]() In part, the book's appeal is sheer voyeurism. As a devotee of these musical works who got married and gave up pot before the punk era even began, I didn't find the sleazy connections the authors hammer home altogether comforting myself. ![]() All are probably too cheap for your blood. ![]() If this description makes you sniff, skip "Please Kill Me," as well as the dozen or two excellent-to-epochal albums that are the direct legacy of a scene whose influence is now ascendant. Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll - always a potent combo. It bills itself as "uncensored" because it never stints on dish, cheerfully laying out what the nosy want to know - including, by my rough count, 100 sexual liaisons and 30 individually identified heroin users, with cameos for a panoply of alcoholic beverages and just about every mind-altering substance then known. Constructed entirely of excerpted interviews with several hundred people, this is an immensely entertaining portrait of a bohemia. "Please Kill Me" concentrates on the second strand. Both strands first surfaced not in Britain, where punk became a cause celebre in late 1976, but in the lower Manhattan of the early 70's. It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth. ![]() Punk was a musical movement that reacted against the pastoral sentimentality, expressionistic excess and superstar bloat of 1960's rock with short, fast, hard, acerbic songs. ![]()
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