In the early seventies, Detroit was the musical hub of America. Everything from the chart topping sounds of Motown records to the vicious proto-punk of The Stooges was being brewed out there and it seemed like there was no end in sight. But by the early eighties, the city was both a physical and cultural wasteland due to major label buyouts of the artists as well as the crippling drug habits of some of the others. Detroit's most known musical export at the time was the vapid sounds of New Wave heartthrobs The Romantics; this wasn't good. It took a gaggle of suburban skateboarders, a grade school teacher and a census bureau clerk to wake this city up from its slumber and start one of the first hardcore punk scenes in America.

"Why Be Something That You're Not" chronicles the first wave of Detroit hardcore from its origins in the late seventies to its demise in the mid-eighties. Through a combination of oral history and extensive imagery, the book proves that even though the Southern California beach towns might have created the look and style of hardcore punk, it was the Detroit scene that cultivated the music's grassroots aesthetic before cultural hot spots such as New York or London even knew what the music was about.