so i just yesterday finished reading this book: please kill me: an uncensored oral history of punk. i bought it because, hey, i'm into the ramones, the clash, y'know, it's pretty good stuff.
i had no idea what i was in for. i mean, we all know that punk was NOT a pretty scene. i just had no idea how un-pretty it was! before reading, i thought, "i'm sure most of them used drugs, went a little crazy at times..." uh...yea. talk about crazy. iggy pop rolling around in broken glass on stage, drug overdoses were just common place, let's not even talk about the sex stuff. at first i thought, ok, i'm going to stop reading this book. and then i thought, this is an interesting quandry. i mean, this book leads to a lot of questions, like: how much were these people influenced by drugs? and, in order to be extremely creative, we're talking bringing on a new movement here, is it essential to be a little crazy, or at least a different kind of personality from the rest of the world?
i read the whole book, and i'll be the first one to say, if you are at ALL offended by the f-word, descriptions of taking drugs, etc., this is probably not the book for you. but i kind of looked through it as a study. and as far as all of the extreme lifestyle descriptions, if anything, they made me more determined than ever that those kinds of things are destructive and not for me. but it does make me wonder, why are so many creative people drawn to it? do you think they were self-destructive from the beginning or just adventurous souls? any thoughts?
