Look, if you’re still debating whether the Dictators’ “Go Girl Crazy!” was more influential than Television’s “Marquee Moon,” or can name the original Heartbreakers lineup without Googling it, McNeil and McCain’s “Please Kill Me” isn’t just another music book—it’s the holy fucking text of punk archaeology.
While trust-fund academics with their Discman copies of “Never Mind The Bollocks” keep churning out sanitized dissertations about “punk as political resistance,” this oral history captures what the CBGB bathroom actually smelled like. The approach is pure vérité—raw, immediate, and unfiltered as a bootleg Stooges cassette recorded on equipment that would make Steve Albini cringe.
What makes this collection essential is its absolute refusal to build convenient myths. This isn’t some VH1 documentary where everyone magically gets along. The Detroit-to-Bowery pipeline gets its proper due—tracing how the Velvets’ drone experiments metastasized through the MC5’s revolutionary swagger before Iggy’s peanut butter-smeared nihilism made it all gloriously unintelligible.
For those who’ve worn through multiple copies of “Raw Power” (I prefer the Bowie mix, not that neutered Columbia Records reissue), this book delivers something increasingly endangered in music discourse—unvarnished fucking reality. It captures an era when artistic merit wasn’t measured in streams or TikTok challenges but in how many teeth you lost at a show.
The narrative arc takes us from Richard Hell’s torn t-shirts to the moment McLaren commodified the whole thing for British consumption, packaging anarchy in convenient £5.99 installments. Along the way, we meet everyone from Danny Fields to Wayne Kramer, their chemically enhanced recollections creating a tapestry that feels less like reading history and more like getting cornered by James Williamson at 4 a.m. when the bar’s closed but nobody’s ready to go home.
For those who understand that Rocket From The Tombs matters more than whatever corporate playlist-filler Pitchfork’s hyping this week, “Please Kill Me” offers a portal to when movements emerged from necessity rather than marketing meetings. Essential reading for anyone who knows their Dead Boys from their Deadbeats.
Navigating the contradictions of our time: This journey of resistance includes affiliate pathways that sustain our collective work while we imagine alternatives to the very systems we must temporarily inhabit.