In the #MeToo Era, Feminist Punk is Still a Powerful Weapon

Everything I know about feminism, I learned from punk rock.

Well, that’s not entirely true, a lot came from reading Simone de Beauvoir and Emma Goldman, and talking with strong women in my life who helped me understand the privileged position I hold as a male in my culture. But the importance of sexual equality, the need to dismantle patriarchy, these are values I hold, values I derived from punk rock.

The enduring #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment and assault (and the numerous revelations about so many well-known predatory men), has left me with a range of complex emotions. While listening to these conversations, I’ve struggled with feelings of helplessness. But I think the best thing I can do as a man is to listen to what women are trying to say, and maybe amplify a few voices.

With about 20 years of experience in various punk, hardcore and metal scenes throughout the United States, I realize I do have something to add, a lesson I’ve learned: Feminist messaging in extreme music has been, and continues to be, a prophylactic and necessary measure to combat sexual harassment and assault of women.

Shawna Potter of War on Women. Photo from Cody Ganzer.

The Baltimore punk band War on Women is one of today’s most outspoken feminist groups, and I’m a huge fan. The band comprises two men and two women, and they really rock the hell out of a live show (that’s what this is all about, after all). War on Women’s message is both empowering (as hardcore should be) and challenging (as punk rock and metal should be).

“We started very intentionally,” singer Shawna Potter said in a recent video interview with the music site Noisey. “We knew we wanted to make a feminist band, and we wanted to talk about things that matter… really explicitly and overtly.”

War on Women is an easy target — they are openly feminist social justice warriors who challenge patriarchy and sing with righteous indignation about rape culture, street harassment, and the infringements upon reproductive rights. Whenever strong and talented women enter a male-dominated space and stake a claim to it, there is a backlash from men, and it’s the same damn thing in the punk scene. The backlash against War on Women has been both disheartening and boringly predictable.

In an essay she wrote for Noisey, singer Shawna Potter tells the story of some of the vitriolic bullshit that happened while on the Vans Warped Tour this year. When a woman holding up a sign that said “Punk shouldn’t be predatory,” showed up at a set from the Boston band The Dickies, a member of the band (known for saying disgusting things about young women), went on an unhinged, threatening rant. Internet storms erupted, and unfortunately The Dickies found their fair share of men coming to their defense and lecturing War on Women and other feminist punk activists to, basically, shut up and leave the punk scene to the boys.

Photo from Cody Ganzer.

To these reactions, Potter has a simple message, which she told Noisey: “If you don’t like our band, that's fine. End sexism and I’ll literally have nothing to sing about.”

But sexism is, and has historically been, a serious issue in punk music. There are far too many stories of abusive men demeaning, harassing, assaulting, and raping women. I’ve seen men grope women at punk shows and take advantage of women who were drunk. One of the only times in my life I ever threw the first punch was at a man assaulting a woman at a punk show. Sexual harassment and assault in punk scenes happens too often, unfortunately, but it can be reduced.

The night before Trump’s inauguration, I attended a show by the British punk/folk songwriter Frank Turner. He said that the most beautiful thing about punk rock is that it allows people to create their own culture, to set their own values. Smashing sexism, stopping sexual violence, these are values, as long as the people within the culture claim them.

I grew up going to every Warped Tour to see bands like Bad Religion, Rancid, Dropkick Murphys, but haven’t been to one in years, and I was skeptical of War on Women’s decision to go on the tour, given its reputation for being a haven of drunken bros and teenage girls. But as I followed War on Women’s statements on social media, I realized the band saw the tour as an opportunity to reach people who might not otherwise be exposed to feminist ideas. Most punk, hardcore and metal shows are dominated by men, and the shows where women match the men in number are rare. War on Women made the most of this opportunity by organizing a campaign called “Safer Scenes.” The band described this campaign as a means of formulating proactive, preventative solutions to sexual harassment and assault that takes place in concerts and festival atmospheres.

“We want to help rid the Warped Tour of the ugliness it’s been plagued with over the years, and to do that we must shine a light on it,” Potter wrote. The idea was to train band members and concertgoers in bystander intervention, to help empower not only would-be victims of sexual harassment and assault but everyone else around to refuse to tolerate sexually abusive behavior.

I have to quickly highlight another example of punk as a weapon against sexual assault, and it comes from a Massachusetts band called Goolagoon. They are an insane amount of fun — after all it’s a Spongebob Squarepants-themed punk/grind band. I saw them play last year at a metal festival in Baltimore, and the fury of their live performance was incredible. The frontwoman, who goes only by Lily, is dynamic singer with an engaging stage presence, and she doesn’t mince her words when it comes to sexual violence.

Southern-California hardcore punk band Abjection. Credit: Cody Ganzer 

As she started off the band’s song “Life of Crime” (from their blistering record of the same name) Lily gripped the microphone and screamed at the top of her lungs: “To every man who’s ever sexually terrorized women: WE ARE NOT YOUR FUCKING PROPERTY! FUCK! RIGHT! OFF!” The band then goes into a brutal 50-second assault full of speedy riffs contrasted against slow, heavy noise. The crowd, myself included, was blown away and the band received loud applause from an audience composed almost entirely of men.

“PRO-FEMINIST” is written in block letters on the cover of Propagandhi’s album, Less Talk, More Rock. As an angry teenage boy (surrounded by a lot of other angry teenage boys), the loudly pro-feminist position of the band jumped out at me. I was 13 when that album came out and I bought it largely because the feminist message struck me as empowering and deserving of respect.

Propagandhi at DC's Rock & Roll Hotel - 2017

This band (one of my all-time favorites) has always been outspoken and in-your-face. I’ve supported the band for years, and saw them play a few weeks ago. They played flawlessly to an insane, excited, diverse crowd of fans, and their new album Victory Lap is a pristine and empowering if you’re feeling depressed in the Trump era.

In a recent interview on Canadian radio, Propagandhi frontman Chris Hannah talked about the “frat boy” punk scene culture that he was speaking out against when the band released Less Talk. “We made a conscious decision, the only conscious decision we ever made, to make sure people knew exactly what we were about, and we put out that record Less Talk, More Rock, which actually said ‘Gay-Positive, Pro-Feminist’ on the cover, and our record sales plummeted, and none of those jocks were at our shows anymore,” Hannah said.

He calls taking that stance “career suicide,” but the album (and the band) has stood the test of time. And the punk scene’s progressive shift has proven that, for every guy who got pissed and left when a band took a pro-feminist stance, more open-minded punks took their place. More women filled that space.

Of course, feminist punk is nothing new. As anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s knows, plenty of momentous feminist punk bands have been sounding these alarms since before I was born. (The music magazine Pitchfork released a great discography of feminist punk classics, which you can check out here. I think it’s an awesome list.)

For me, Crass’ “Penis Envy” is a classic feminist punk record, and one of my favorite punk albums of all time. Musically astringent, raw and chaotic, with intense vocals from Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre, and lyrics immersed in feminism and anarcho-politics. It’s as powerful today as it was in 1981. Bikini Kill, X-Ray Spex, Vice Squad, the Slits, even pre-punk rockers like Patti Smith — this movement goes way back. But feminist punk culture is still alive and well. And that’s a great thing, because it is necessary, effective, and a whole lot of fun, too. 

What drew me to punk and metal scenes was the welcoming atmosphere, as strange as that may sound considering how loud and abrasive the music can be. I found punk shows to be spaces where people from all backgrounds could find other misfits and forget their problems while listening to some kick-ass music. Punk hasn’t died and won’t anytime soon, young men are being attracted to punk scenes for the first time right now. My hope is that they, like me, will be introduced to powerful feminist messages at a young age. And I hope that fighting sexism, misogyny and sexual violence will continue to be a value that many punk rockers hold.

This post first appeared on the site Good Men Project.

Built to Last: How a Jersey Kid in Ukraine Found Strength in NY Hardcore

Growing up on the Jersey Shore, I became aware of New York hardcore quite early. There were thriving music scenes all over New Jersey (Asbury Park was just a few beach towns north), and I was surrounded by all sorts of punk-related influences. But, at that point in my life, I found the stuff coming out of New York to be a bit too gritty, too intense.

Albums from Agnostic Front, Sick of it All, Warzone and others intrigued me, but I couldn’t quite relate to the anger, the desperation, the pain. Punk and ska seemed more appropriate. After all, I was a happy-go-lucky surfer kid from a beach bum town with a loving, caring family — I didn’t need hardcore anthems about resilience and persistence in the face of crisis.

That all changed after I moved to Kyiv, Ukraine, in the mid-90s.

“Will you stay with those who will only drag you down? Or do you cut the ties and open yourself and hold your moral ground?”

I was a young teenager, but I didn’t have to look for trouble — it looked for me. Drunk adults trying to pick fights. Gangs of Ukrainian teenagers trying to rob me for anything of value. Neo-Nazi scum with no patience for Americans. Cops looking to snatch up Westerners and shake them down for cash. Mafia types with short tempers, strutting around like they owned the streets. 

I saw a man’s body face down in an apartment complex with his throat slit, the floor puddled with blood. I saw homeless people with rotting sores, packs of wild dogs roaming the streets, a drunk man get his skull crushed by a car.

It frightened the shit out of me. At the time, I didn’t have the coping mechanisms I needed to process it all.

“Side by side we wave the flag of discontent and faith… We stand defiant, we can’t be silent. We might never change the world, at least we’ve had our say. The wheel’s been set in motion as we slowly chip away.”

So I bought a pair of brass knuckles and a cache of switchblades, and I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t leave the house without at least one knife (preferably two in case I lost the first.) At Gidropark, a dystopian fairgrounds located on an island in the Dnipr River, I found a sand dune where people had constructed a crazy outdoor gym. I began bench-pressing tank treads, curling pipes, deadlifting old truck tires. When I got jumped or chased by Ukrainian dudes calling me a faggot, I was always outnumbered. But at least I could up my odds.

“Brother, I’ll always look out for you… Sister, we’ll brave the outside world…”

To pass time, I would frequently buy cheap Ukrainian cigarettes and beer and roam the streets of Kyiv, looking for places to explore or hunker down. One afternoon I found a sketchy-looking basement with a Slayer poster in a cracked window. Inside, the light was on, and I saw a bunch of music, so I assumed it was some primitive Ukrainian version of a record store. I took a deep breath and entered.

The guy behind the small counter had a cigarette in his mouth, tattoos on his hands, no hair on his head. He said something to me but I just smiled and nodded, hoping he wouldn’t realize I was an American. Most of the albums were thrash metal or bootleg tapes of Michael Jackson and other American pop stars. But one cassette jumped out at me with its simple design of an old, rusty American truck and a dragon logo on the front. Sick of it All’s Built to Last was the first New York hardcore album I purchased, and I paid that scary dude a handful of Ukrainian koupons for it without saying a word. 

“When it’s us versus them, you can always count on me.”

I ran that cassette tape into the fucking ground. Now I could relate to NYHC. Now I understood what these motherfuckers were yelling about. Perseverance, pride, strength, yes, but also devotion, honor, friendship. I didn’t have many friends except for my younger brother, but Sick of It All sang about unity, self-respect, resilience. I needed all of these things in my life.

As a lonely American teenager in Ukraine, those anthems gave me inspiration and strength. The intensity of the sound, the power of the lyrics, the positive aesthetic, it empowered me to spit in the face of chaos and uncertainty. I was still scared as shit, but I told myself I could refuse to let fear control me. 

My brother, three years younger, was in similar situations, and as we listened to the music together, I saw it take a similar toll in his mind. He soon let my sister give him a Mohawk and — holy shit! — random Ukrainian dudes lost their minds over that.

Today, to be honest, this album is not one of my favorite hardcore albums, although I think it holds up quite well. But when it comes to naming the album that has had the most significant impact on my life? No question: Built to Last.

“You’re not in this all alone, just look around and you’ll see. The answer’s right before your eyes. I’m here for you, and you for me… True friends will always be there.”

I made it back to the States after high school and moved to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. I was broke, working at Kinko’s, and paying my way through college. At night I slept in a basement that cost me $500 a month (under the table, of course) and frequently flooded with sewage. What little cash I had I spent going to CBGBs to watch bands like Agnostic Front, TSOL, Youth Brigade, Sham 69. 

When I heard Sick of It All was playing at CBGBs, I told my boss at Kinko’s I got food poisoning that left me suffering from “violent diarrhea.” She didn’t ask any follow-up questions. Fuck yeah — I had the night off.

Per usual, CBGBs was packed and sweaty as hell. And Sick of It All killed it. The chaos of the crowd combined with the precision of the music, the insanity of Pete Koller’s guitar jumps, and the sincerity of Lou Koller’s belted lyrics. And when they played the song “Built to Last,” of course I thought back to Ukraine in the 90s. 

I had made it out, relatively unscathed, and I was at the home of New York hardcore, watching the band that had helped me power through.

I screamed with Lou until I lost my voice.

Built to Last turned 20 years old this year. And, fuck, I feel old. When I realized the album was turning 20, I had an intense flashback to the specific time and place where I bought that tape. It had been a few years, but I listened to the album and the memories came flooding back in visceral fashion. The music that had inspired me as a 13-year-old still had power.

And you know the best thing about this album and countless other NYHC albums like it? Scared misfit kids from all over the world have stories just like mine.

Long live NYHC.

Art and Identity in Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”

It’s taken me years to pick up Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids.” Now that I’ve finished it, I’m wondering why I waited so long. Like Smith’s poetry and music, her memoir is beautifully composed but incisive, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

The book has a straightforward structure. Smith starts with her childhood and moves from adolescence into adulthood. Growing up for Smith seems like a continuous run of artistic explorations. From an early age, Smith becomes fascinated with the individual’s ability to create art and captivate the attention and imagination of an audience. A childhood trip to the Museum of Art in Philadelphia has a profound impact on her:

But it was the work in a hall devoted to Picasso, from his harlequins to Cubism, that pierced me the most. His brutal confidence took my breath away… secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

As a young woman from South Jersey, Smith makes the common trek to New York City. When she arrives, in 1967, she can hardly contain her stoke. She visits lots of bookstores and hangs out in parks and coffee shops in Greenwich Village, just like I did when I first moved to NYC.

It’s during this wandering period when Smith meets Robert Mapplethorpe. The two become inseparable, each inspired by the other to explore different artistic themes and media. Their relationship is the crux of this memoir, which works because their enduring connection is a beautiful thing.

When Smith meets Mapplethorpe, he’s struggling to accept his own sexuality, struggling to find a place in the world for his artistic expression.

He wasn’t certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize.

Together, Smith and Mapplethorpe weave their way through the thriving art rock scene of late 60s/early 70s New York. They move into the Chelsea hotel together, which Smith describes as being, “like a doll’s house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive.”

Horror, Insanity and Punk in Nick Blinko’s “The Primal Screamer”

Nathaniel Snoxell is a disturbed young bloke. This 20-year-old first meets Dr. Rodney H. Dweller, a London psychiatrist, after slicing up both of his wrists in a botched suicide attempt that is anything but a “cry for help.” The doctor admits that he’s has never, “seen such grevious self-inflicted injuries as those that lay upon the wrists of Nathaniel Snoxell.”

Nick Blinko’s novel The Primal Screamer is structured as a series of first-person journal entries from this Dr. Dweller, who treats Nat on-and-off from 1979 to 1984. In these journal entries, Dweller tries to understand why Nat suffers from an infatuation with death and a “strong desire for oblivion.” Here are some of the doctor’s early observations of Nat’s mental state:

“Nat’s death wish is both incredibly deep-rooted and close to the surface.”

“What the poor boy has repressed for these last twenty years is inconceivable.”

“At times, though, he feels murderous. Paradoxically, I know he has the wherewithal to kill himself and yet I do not think that he could ever kill another person: he is emphatically one who could not deliberately injure a fly.”

The doctor uses psychotherapy, hypnotherapy and a method he calls “primal therapy” — a kind of deep hypnotherapy designed to uncover trauma stemming back to birth, even earlier. Dr. Dweller barely considers medicating Nat, a choice that seems like it borders on professionally irresponsible considering Nat’s “severe mental distress.” At one point, frustrated yet again by the lack of progress with his client, the doctor laments: “I wish I could give him a pill that would provide the thrill and insight of his love of death, whilst simultaneously freeing him from the threat that it poses to his life. Such a pill, sadly, does not exist, and psychology favours all-pervasive healthy normalcy over morbid unwholesomeness, however visionary it might be.”

A deeply anti-social person, one day Nat picks up the guitar and starts strumming. He soon meets up with a group of anarchist punks who start a band, making music that they view as a means of artistic and socio-political liberation. Dr. Dweller is skeptical of Nat’s growing obsession with this whole “punk” thing: “I had thought [punk music] extinct by now, or at least out of fashion. The punk styles have been transmuted, absorbed and adopted by society, though the polemics — always a minority taste — remain untouched. Nat informed me that ‘punk is not a fashion, it’s an attitude.’ I have heard this somewhere before.”

A classical violinist himself, Dr. Dweller admits that the interaction with other band members and gig attendees could do some good for the reclusive Nat. “Although at the moment he only aspires to long drone-ridden dirges, I believe that his fascination for the instrument will eventually educe much more beneficial effects, most of them probably not musical.”

But even with raucous anarcho-punk as an outlet, Nat cannot defeat his anxiety, depression and morbid fascinations.

The suicide attempts, his constant feelings of dread and despair, the bombardment of dark images, Nat’s struggles feel intensely real, even though they are interpreted through the doctor/narrator. Perhaps Nat’s tortured mental state seems so authentic because it is based on Blinko’s own experiences. Blinko suffers from Schizoactive disorder and has been hospitalized just like Nat. The macabre and obsessive drawings that litter this book seem inexctricably related to Blinko’s own delusions. In order to draw or paint, Blinko sometimes stops taking his therapeutic medication, which allows him access to the deepest and darkest chasms of his mind. It also allows the reader a harrowing and unobstructed view of severe mental distress.

Author/Artist Nick Blinko.

Nick Blinko has a chaotic but ingenious mind. The frontman, lyricist, guitarist and illustrator for the anarcho-punk group Rudimentary Peni, Blinko is no stranger to pushing the limits of artistic expression. I love the way Maximum Rock N Roll describes the author: “Nick Blinko is a madman. That’s not intended as a pejorative opinion but rather a statement of plain fact.” A veteran of what is sometimes called the “outsider art” scene, Blinko’s attacks his canvasses with blank ink pens, scrawling obsessive patterns, distorted faces, broken bodies and all sorts of demonic creatures. Shocking in their subject matter, Blinko’s drawings are also incredible in their exquisite detail. (Click here to view images of some of Blinko’s work from OutsiderArt.co.uk.) Dozens of Blinko’s sketches (including the scary-awesome cover) are scattered throughout this book. It’s worth buying Primal Screamer for the drawings alone, they’re that fucking good.

This novel is more than just creepy, spooky and punky, it’s deeply philosophical. Primal Screamer focuses on the desire to create art in spite of — or perhaps because of — traumatic and painful experiences. But Nat (and ultimately Blinko himself) don’t view art as some cheesy therapeutic endeavor. Rather, art is about combating nihilism. Even when dealing with disturbing and macabre subject matter, art exists only because of the active participation of the artist. And every act of creation is inherently optimistic. “Creativity,” writes Dr. Dweller, “however pessimistic it appears, is quintessentially optimistic, proven by the fact of its actual existence.”

The book is also an interesting case studying in the shortfalls of the fiction-nonfiction dichotomy. Nat’s band in the book follows Rudimentary Peni’s real-life story. Nat’s mental struggles are Blinko’s. But the end result is a work of “fiction.” 

How do we make sense of this? The author of the introduction ponders, “whether, in their search for truth, human beings are capable of anything other than fiction. Doesn’t everything we express, no matter how ‘truthful’ we intend it to be, come out distorted by virtue of having passed through our individual and unique minds?” It’s a very good question, one Blinko spends 122 pages dissecting.

While much of this book is semi-autobiographical, there comes a point near the end when the connection with Blinko’s personal experience is severed. Here, things take an even darker turn. Nat mysteriously disappears. While trying to find him, the doctor falls upon a place so macabre it drives him completely insane. Trust me, I’m not giving away the ending, but suffice it to say H.P. Lovecraft would be proud.

If you’re not sold yet on this story, I don’t know what else to write. So here’s a quick sketch of mine that’s inspired by Blinko’s work.

© Isaac James Baker

The Communal Cacophony of Crass

A Review of "The Story of Crass" by George Berger

Crass is not your average punk band. Come to think of it, they’re not really a “band” in any conventional sense. Come to think of it, they’re not really anything in any conventional sense. What with their all black clothing, their album covers and broadsides that would offend pretty much anyone with a belief system, the Dial House commune that is such an inseparable part of their story and music, their fear-inducing logo. 

And then there’s Crass’ self-imposed isolation from the mainstream capitalist economy, their D.I.Y., anti-authoritarian, pacifist, feminist ethic whose echoes can be heard in a slew of punk bands, protest movements and, more recently, Occupy Wall Street. With all this material, George Berger’s “The Story of Crass” almost writes itself.

The difficulty of telling Crass’ story lies in the complexity of the individuals involved, and in Crass’ refusal to be categorized. It’s hard to analyze a group that eschews all labels. Even my classification of Crass as a “seminal British punk band” is contradictory. In my mind Crass is probably the most polarizing and most misunderstood “punk” group of all time. “Nobody, it seemed, was neutral about Crass,” writes George Berger in his chronicle of Crass, “and the people that didn’t love what they were doing hated them…”

“You can’t just tolerate Crass,” the book quotes music journalist Paul Du Noyer, “you must either reject them outright or else prepare to get every idea in your head radically shook up – they probably won’t ‘convert’ you but they’ll sure as hell confuse you, and often that can be the healthiest effect of all.” I agree that getting “every idea in your head radically shook up” is healthy. But it’s neither comfortable nor easy. The average person doesn’t want to have their beliefs questioned and the average bloke doesn’t spin a record because he wants to fuck with his own assumptions about punk, music, sex, gender roles, libertarian ideals and government. This is one of the many reasons almost everyone chooses to “reject them outright.” It’s easier to condemn that try to understand something, especially something as complicated as Crass. Of course, this is one of the reasons they’re so fucking interesting to me.

Crass was simultaneously punk as fuck and not punk. They drew as much inspiration from experimental composers like John Cage and free jazz than from other punk bands. A journalist wrote of a 1979 Crass show: “It’s sharp music of fiction and friction that requires too much concentration to fully appreciate.” Berger writes: “Crass, drawing on both the wide artistic and cultural experience of their members and the spirit of the times, had metamorphosed from a bunch of lads out on the glorified piss to a serious multi-age, multi-gender, multi-media assault on conformity and narrow minds.” Their records, stage presence and messages had a “dada-esque intention to confuse.”

The mainstream understanding of British punk is usually focused on the Clash and the Sex Pistols. The Clash is also complicated, and I’ll leave that for another essay. Sure, the Pistols were great, but let’s be honest: it was a gimmick. The Sex Pistols were insecure prigs begging for a spotlight, any spotlight. Johnny Rotten had a great stage presence, and, yeah, he pissed off the status quo by screaming about being an anarchist and an antichrist, but in the end it was more about showmanship and fashion than anything else. (Stepping off soap box…) But Crass was in a whole different category. They took seriously the punk ethic of D.I.Y. self-sufficiency. They didn’t just yell “Fuck the system!” they bent it over and fucked it. Again and again. Where other bands, media and the culture at large saw the raw energy of punk and tried to make a buck off it, Crass tried to operate outside of the monetary system. When they first started putting out records they spent more on the vinyl and the revolutionary inserts and collage artwork that they lost money on every record they sold. Think of the worst example of a band or artist “selling out,” however you define that term. Got it pictured in your mind? Okay… Crass is the polar opposite.

When Punk Rock Was Dangerous: A Review of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”

Reading “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” is like living through a time I wasn’t alive to see. The early punk scene has always fascinated me, ever since I spun my father’s Ramones, Stooges, Clash and Sex Pistols records when I was twelve. When I discovered punk, I fell in love with it. I felt the music and the movement were created just for me. It was such an intense connection. Punk became not just a kind of music, but a prism through which I saw the world in a different way. Its pioneers, history, ethics and attitude made a tremendous impact on me as a teenager, an impact I am still feeling today. And this has to be the best book I’ve read on the subject.

“Please Kill Me,” named after a bulls eye T-shirt that Richard Hell wore on the Lower East Side, is a voyeuristic journey of sex, drugs, rock & roll and self-destruction. Reading it is like getting drunk and punched in the face at CBGBs. You get all the good, and all the bad. All the rock, and all the puke and piss. Seriously, insanity lives in between the covers of this book. There are no introductions, no back story, no footnotes. “Please Kill Me” is just rockers, groupies and artists talking about the old days. All you get are their names: Alan Vega, Nico, Lou Reed, Dee Dee Ramone, Malcom McLaren. And the rest is just the transcript of these recorded conversations. So the words spat onto the pages are raw and dense. It’s gritty stuff. And there’s something in this book to offend everyone.

Much of the book focuses on the New York rock and roll scene in the late 60s and early 70s, probably because that’s what the book’s editor Legs McNeil knows best. He was editor of Punk Magazine and a permanent resident of New York rock chaos. I say rock and roll because, to be honest, I feel the title of this book is a bit misleading. This isn’t a book about the history of punk. Sure, some punk bands are featured, but a large portion of the book is spent recalling the drug-fueled escapades of bands like the Velvet Underground, MC5, Iggy and the Stooges and others. I guess some people call these bands punk, but I view them as a kind of bridge between sixties rock and roll and the explosion of punk in the late 70s and early 80s. There’s some really great stuff in here about the Clash and the Sex Pistols. But this book stops right at the beginning of the LA hardcore punk scene, the emergence of New York hardcore and the British punk bands that would go on to define the punk ethic: Sham 69, the Cockney Rejects, Crass, etc. Instead, more time is given to earlier pre-punk bands like the Doors and MC5. It’s still fascinating, even if it’s a bit odd that a book on punk starts in 1967.

The content of this book is a product of Legs McNeil’s belief that punk was a strictly regional phenomenon. It was a bunch of New York junkies, vagabonds and provocateurs who all knew each other and did whatever they wanted to. He claims, even by quoting himself in the book, that “punk” is dead. (I hate it the phrase “punk is dead.” Here’s my take on that shit.) It was a small cadre of chaotic New York musicians and fans, and as soon as it wasn’t that, it was dead. He also believes the Sex Pistols played a major role in killing it.

First of all, McNeil’s definition of punk is far too narrow. It wasn’t something he invented, and it isn’t his, even if he did play a part in coining the term as it related to music. Art forms are not items to be possessed and controlled. And, unfortunately, McNeil is too self-absorbed in his own place in the punk narrative to realize that punk was so much more than him and his friends getting wasted and breaking things. A lot of the New York punks quoted here decried the Sex Pistols as being opportunistic nihilist jerks (which they most certainly were). But they didn’t single-handedly destroy punk. The Pistols don’t deserve that much credit. They were a bunch of talentless, attention-seeking wimps who enjoyed causing a fuss and getting on the front page. McNeil and others in the New York scene seem to defend media stunts by Iggy and the Stooges, the New York Dolls and Patti Smith but then denounce the Sex Pistols for doing the exact same thing. So, even while this book contains interviews with dozens of people, it is essentially a one-sided view of punk rock, a view from New York’s Lower East Side. And McNeil is no unbiased source, that’s for sure.

So, I think of this book as the story of punk’s early foundations. Of course, this is all just academic shit. Point is: the book is awesome. And if it tried to encompass the entirety of early punk rock, it would fail miserably anyway.

It’s fascinating to hear the way musicians speak, as they are so focused on rhythm and pacing and tone in their art. So the flow of the prose, combined with this hardcore, no-bullshit language, is incredible to read. It’s been superbly edited, so the individual transcripts blend together to form an integrated whole, but McNeil hasn’t cleaned up the language or sentence structure. Junkies talk like junkies and artists talk like artists. While this book is nothing more than a collection of recorded confessions, it does have a narrative arc to it. And that’s due to the editing. So, technically speaking, this book must’ve taken an ass-load of work. But it’s really pulled together well.

One overarching theme in this book is the drug-like, addictive, dangerous aspects of roll and roll. It can easily turn from chaotic fun to overdose and death. There’s always the danger that rockers and their crews would take the ride too far. “At that time, people still seemed indestructible,” writes Legs McNeil of a time when Patti Smith fell off a stage during a show and broke a vertebrae. “There was a cartoon quality to everyone’s life.” Well, not forever.

As one punk rocker says, “The streets are tough, aren’t they?” Interesting and hilarious, “Please Kill Me” is also tragic. Many of the people in these pages are talented, beautiful, funny, caring and artistic. But so many of them throw it all away. There are so many tragic deaths recounted in this book: Johnny Thunders, Nancy Spungen, Sid Vicious and others. The one that hits me the most is Dee Dee Ramone’s girlfriend, Connie. She was a prostitute and a drug addict and her relationship with Dee Dee was epic for its violence and chaos. But by the way Dee Dee talks about her, it’s obvious that he loved her. He was just too messed up to love her properly. Connie, for her part, tried so hard to make a home for Dee Dee. And then she ends up overdosed and dead in a doorway in some East Village dump. It’s so senselessly tragic. As the punk scene in New York gets bogged down in drugs, violence, broken hearts, the book begins to read like a Shakespearean tragedy. Some parts are so heartbreaking they’re tough to get through.

Patti Smith is really intriguing in this book, and I’m glad that she’s one of the main characters. She comes off as a freak among freaks, which is what she was, and is, I guess. She watched guys as they slept and kind of stalked some of them. It seems like when she wanted something (rock status, a guy, and eventually marriage) she went out and got it. She also seemed more driven than the other characters in this scene. Maybe that’s because she was probably the only one in the Village not shooting heroin or speed or snorting coke. She was definitely an individual: masturbating on stage, reciting poetry, emitting sounds like a street preacher, dressing herself up as a prophet. She’s a really fascinating figure, and this book does a great job of showing her for who she really is.

The latter parts of the book deal more with the Ramones, which is great. The more I read about the Ramones, the better. Joey Ramone isn’t humble about the place of the Ramones’ first album in rock and roll history. “It kicked off punk rock and started the whole thing - as well as us.” Thing is, he’s right. The Ramones’ first album is one of the best ever made. They didn’t really know it at the time, but they were making history in 1975 and 1976. And anyone who loves any kind of punk rock, or rock and roll at all, absolutely has to love that first album. It doesn’t get better than that. And when other punk bands set out to do their own thing, they knew it could never be as good as the Ramones. I love Black Flag. They’re not The Ramones. I love Bad Religion. They’re not the Ramones. I love the Sex Pistols. They’re not the Ramones. God, the Ramones are the greatest band ever, period. It’s true, and this book is further proof of that.

It’s really interesting to track punk from the Ramones in the streets of New York to England. Reading this book is a real reminder of how the Ramones weren’t really accepted in the U.S. outside of New York. Later, yes, in California and pretty much the rest of the country, but not initially. The Ramones went to London because they felt the scene there was ready for them. And in England, the kids were paying attention. Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious were there. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones were there. And when the English kids see what the Ramones are doing, they take it and run with it. Bands sprout up all over the place. “I felt like what we had done as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England by a younger and more violent audience,” says one New York punk about the 1976-1977 punk explosion in England.

Then there’s the Clash, who show up at a Ramones show in London acting like tools and poseurs. They weren’t punk, they were “acting punk,” as the Ramones describe it. And it’s so true. I like the Clash, but they could never be the Ramones. And they knew it. The Clash knew they were ripping off punk, reggae, dub and left-wing politics. They knew they were going to be big, but they also knew they were covering up their real identities. They were, after all, just upper-middle class egotists. They might have played punk music, but they were not punks. And the Sex Pistols weren’t much different. Harder and more extreme, yes, but they were also a bunch of poseurs. When the New York bands met Johnny Rotten, they thought he “was an awful little poseur – phony, social climbing – you know, just a little twerp… He wasn’t rock and roll at all. He was just an opportunist.” And while Sid Vicious wins more friends in the New York scene, he wasn’t as tough as he pretended to be. He was a lost child, a boy who latched onto women for attention, protection and love. Sid’s innocence, and his loss of innocence, is chronicled by Nancy Spungen, the woman he would be accused of murdering (but never tried). The story of Sid and Nancy is well-known, but in this book it’s told by all of the people around, and it adds a really human touch to what was otherwise a pop culture celebrity destruction fest. It’s amazing, but reading this book, I really feel like Sid loved Nancy. Of course, he was as screwed up as Dee Dee Ramone. The discussion also focuses on Sid’s alleged murder, and how there was no real evidence that he actually did it.

There’s a ton in here about The Dead Boys, a group of chaotic dudes transplanted from Cleveland right as punk was exploding in New York. I know of the band, but, to be honest, I haven’t listened to much of their stuff. This book makes me think I should go back and give their records a spin.

As a Jersey boy and someone who has lived in New York for several years, this book is a trip back in time to a New York I never knew but always wanted to. Going to CBGBs to see Sham 69, Rancid, Sick of it All, Agnostic Front, T.S.O.L. and others, I always longed for the heydays of punk in the late 1970s. I wanted to live what the people in this book lived. Well, this book is as close as I will get.

What a powerful read.