Marie-Therese's Reviews > Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

Drugs, drugs, drugs. Sex, sex, sex. Violence and vomit and just a little bit of music. Virtually no analysis and not much beyond "first we did this, and then we did this, and then we went there, and we were so stoned, man."

What might have had punch and charm if embedded in an historically-informed narrative just drags interminably here, as one after the other rather sad, sordid character races to a tragic and untimely end. The actual oral documentation is valuable and worthy of being recorded somewhere but it does not make a very cohesive or illuminating book. Having just read Arlette Farge's magisterial The Allure of the Archives', a book dealing with 18th century criminal interviews and judicial records which cautions against taking oral sources at face value, not because they're unreliable, but because we are as we "listen" to them without context or a broader sense of how they fit into individual's entire lives and their place in the world, I wondered what a careful historian might make of all this material. Certainly something deeper and more engaging than this.