Been feeling silly and nostalgic lately, hence the last two posts. I spent most of my weekend ripping mp3's from my CD collection. I've got about 10 GB (130 hours) of them on my laptop now, which is saying something since it only has a 20 GB hard drive. So I guess the hours spent converting Camouflage, Tones On Tail, and the Manic Street Preachers got to me, enough to get me quoting Ferris Bueller's Day Off and New Order's "World In Motion", I suppose.

Back to my recent reading, I finished Please Kill Me a few weeks ago. Very interesting book. I was pleased that it began with the real roots of punk, in the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, rather than trying to sell us on how The Ramones or the Sex Pistols invented the whole thing. What did I learn from this book? Well, let's see ... (1) according the American viewpoint, not only were the Sex Pistols a bunch of drunken morons, Malcolm McClaren essentially stole punk from the NY underground, (2) depending on the evening, Iggy Pop was a brilliant performer or a binging incoherent junkie, and (3) Dee Dee Ramone had perhaps the most self-destructive taste in women ever. Being an oral history, the book can claim to be effectively unbiased as it presents a number of conflicting viewpoints. Of course, editing and juxtaposition can easily skew sentiment, but the challenge to the reader is to piece together what really happened from these scattered recollections. Particularly interesting to me was the bitterness of the NY crowd towards the commercialization of punk by the British. The sentiment portrayed in the book is that punk originated in the U.S. and was coopted by the London scene through Malcolm McClaren (who managed the New York Dolls in the mid-70's). The degree of truth in this claim is up for debate (interestingly, Punk magazine was started in NYC in the four years before the British punk explosion in 1976-77).

The book encouraged me to check out Television, who I'm listening to at the moment ... very cool. At the same time, it didn't endear me at all to Jim Carroll, Patti Smith, or Debbie Harry, who I wasn't too keen on to begin with. It also confirmed that Lou Reed was/is the scene's biggest asshole, but I knew that already and it doesn't change my appreciation of the Velvet Underground. If nothing else, the book contains hundreds of amusing anecdotes concerning the drunken and drugged antics of musicians from 1967-1980. Anyone interested in laughing, or better yet wonderful independent music during that period, should definitely check it out.