Please Kill Me Part Two
April 19, 2018, by Lily
Last week, while writing about “Please Kill Me,” I wrote more about the environment, the community, and the aesthetic of the pop culture. This week, while reading later chapters of the book, I saw a different side of punk, and of punk rock stars, one filled with heroin, drama, and fear. Drugs, for the most part, played a large part in most of the chapters. Richard Hell mentions at one point how he looked forward to getting high all the time, and how it eventually became more of a past time for him (165). While I always knew that drugs were a big part of the music scene in the 70’s and 80’s, reading about it, from an oral retelling, struck me as sort of sad. It didn’t seem like a “cool” or “fun” thing to do, but more of an escape for people with no where else to go, and with lives that didn’t quite make sense. At one point, even The Dolls “wanted to get back to New York because it was easier for them to score heroin” (194). Still, the art these people managed to create was incredible.
I’m not really sure if the later chapters describe the fall of punk, but it somewhat seems like it. If not the fall, the changing of the genre. Penny Arcade mentioned how, when she went to visit her old friend Patti Smith, she had become something else. She couldn’t be the person she used to be, because she was exhausting that personality in public, for everyone to be a part of. She had been used and somewhat abused by fame (188). Reading those passages, and seeing the intense fandom that surrounded Patti Smith, also saddened me. I feel as though punk was created to spite the system, and to be somewhat revolutionary. It was meant for music lovers who weren’t afraid to take risks. What Penny Arcade described was the washed out personality of an artist who used to make art for the sake of art, but was now tired, changed, from the fame monster. However, I don’t think this phenomena is exclusive to punk. Unfortunately, I think it is hard for most bands to retain their personalities and uniqueness, once they become mainstream, or get a taste for fame. Even Tom Verlaine, the front runner of the Ramones, eventually tried to rise up the ranks and be like Bob Dylan, to achieve that kind of fame. And in doing so, he alienated those around him and acted as though he were better than everyone else (196). Is that the price for success? Either way, one quote really stood out to me during the reading, and in my opinion, encapsulated the tragedy and allure of punk. Ed Sanders writes “The milieu out of which punk arose also reminds me of…the kind of life-style where it’s gritty, ominous, the drums of doom, only you don’t know if they’re the drums of doom or somebody’s song. But there’s always the drums underneath it all, drumming” (256). This sense of foreboding, of danger, of teetering on the edge of something dark and unknown, is not an unfamiliar feeling in the world of music, but one that I found fitting to punk itself.