Why were so many of the key grunge musicians such dysfunctional fuckups and so incapable of keeping it together?
Casualties:
>following a prolonged and very public struggle with depression, addiction and his own conflicting impulses, Kurt Cobain blows his brains out and ends Nirvana, one of the biggest bands on the planet at the time >following Alice In Chains' rise to the status of one of the biggest hard rock bands in the world and his ex-fiancee's death, Layne Staley becomes a full blown shut-in, spending almost a decade isolated in his apartment, obliterating himself with drugs, playing videogames and working on art projects which never left his living room before finally dying one of the most grotesque and pitiful deaths in pop history >Soundgarden implode onstage at their creative and commercial peak, eventually reuniting for a lukewarm comeback album and series of tours before Chris Cornell kills himself out of the blue >Kristen Pfaff joins Hole and promptly dies of an overdose just as the band is on the verge of blowing up
Near-casualties (and Pearl Jam):
>Mark Lanegan eventually goes clean after years of being a Cobain/Staley-tier junkie and someone who a lot of people weren't expecting to still be alive by 2000 >Mark Arm eventually goes clean after a series of near-routine overdoses >Patty Schemel leaves Hole and promptly descends into full-blown homeless junkiedom, eventually going clean and putting her life back together >Pearl Jam go on a well-meaning but ultimately futile boycott against Ticketmaster and music videos, derailing their careers as a near-U2-tier arena band and becoming a strictly cult concern in the process
Why was this particular scene ripe with tragedy? By comparison with the other major pop/rock phenomenon of the 90s, most of the major Britpop musicians were just as excessive and destructive in their behaviors and habits and yet all of those people are still alive and well.
Most musicians (or artists in general) are dysfunctional fuckups. Rockers just don't bother to hide it.
Kevin Ross
Would it have happened if he’d stuck to hair metal?
Bentley Torres
>most of the major Britpop musicians were just as excessive and destructive in their behaviors and habits and yet all of those people are still alive and well. different drugs, britpop was all about e's and coke and party drugs, heroin was on the menu but not so much over here
Jace Rogers
Grunge has it's roots 80s American underground and punk, which at the time, and even to a degree now, was for outcasts, freaks, and angry young men, all of who are prime candidates for drug addiction. They were taking inspiration from a wide variety of music so a lot of regular working class drug addled people like Cobain were able to become sensations thanks to labels figuring out how to market their image.
Isaac Stewart
Yeah it's like hair metal. The music and attitude were fun and the drugs were different. Cocaine makes you want to get up and dance, heroin makes you want to crawl into a corner and die.
Andrew Hall
This, Suede and Oasis were know to be dysfunctional as fuck.
Asher Allen
I can't recall a major drug death in the hair metal scene.
Nathan Jackson
>no mention of Andrew Wood
Juan Phillips
Most of them were white trash from broken/dysfunctional homes and they were generally pretty insecure and self-loathing, something success couldn't overcome. It's not coincidence that Eddie Vedder was from a sheltered middle class California upbringing and so he didn't end up like his peers.
Blake Watson
>Eddie Vedder was from a sheltered middle class California upbringing and so he didn't end up like his peers.
Vedder was a surfer jock but his upbringing wasn't much happier than most of the Seattle natives. His old man was a violent drunk IIRC. And calling his upbringing middle class is a stretch for sure. Lower middle-class for sure.
Liam Fisher
Don't forget Mike Starr >original bassist of AiC, leaves or is kicked out just as they hit their commercial peak >ODs and almost dies while shooting up with Layne and Kurt on tour. >kicked out of AiC because he does TOO MUCH heroin (this is the same band that Layne Staley was in) >arrested at the airport in 1994 carrying weed, trying to steal someone else's luggage. >literally spirals out of control for the next 10 years, frequently busted for possession and DUIs, does jail time >one of the last people to see Layne alive, regrets not calling 911 even though he could tell Layne was "really sick". >Another Salt Lake police report showed that in 2003, Starr and his father, John Starr, were arrested for allegedly doing drugs on a Southwest flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. John Starr said he was taking his son to drug rehab in Seattle at the time, the report states. John Starr was witnessed injecting Mike Starr with a syringe, and the two began arguing after the needle broke off, according to the report. Mike Starr was seen going to the plane bathroom for 15 to 20 minutes. When he returned, he handed John Starr something, and "John then turned towards the window with a cut up coke can and a lighter," the report states. The two were arrested as they stepped off the plane. Investigators found the Starrs to be in possession of a syringe and balloons filled with heroin, according to police records. In Mike Starr's pockets, police said they found Valium, Xanax, and Celexa. When they checked the Starrs' luggage, they found drug paraphernalia and prescription drugs. Starr claimed his father forced him to shoot up in the plane, according to the report. >dies of prescription overdose at 44
Kevin Brown
Brett was a fucking mess back then, so was Damon at one point
Ryan Williams
OP you gotta realise Cobain was in pain. He had a painful stomach condition for most of his life and was taking painkillers for that.
I've gone through appendicitis and it was gone in a couple of days thanks to good health care in this country.
To suffer from that kind of pain for years is something none of us anons can understand. Suicide is never an answer but we may not judge him for we can't understand the level of suffering he had gone through.
Kevin Adams
Who'd play him in the biopic?
Ethan Garcia
He had shit childhood and dysfunctional family too.
Lucas Sanders
I say that it was mainly party drugs, remember you can get addicted to party drugs too, especially when there isn't anyone stopping you, specifically coke
Ryder Ross
He was a junkie looking for any reason to get high.
His music wouldn't feel the same without the drugs. All those AiC albums are his journey from liking drugs to progressively getting destroyed by them and the MTV unplugged might as well be his funeral
Sebastian Roberts
Dirt [Columbia, 1992] Crunch, crunch, crunch. Riff, riff, riff. Way harder, louder, and more metallic than Soundgarden will ever be. The price of all this power is that it's also stupider--the sound of hopeless craving. This is a heroin album, take it or leave it--"Junkhead" isn't ironic and probably isn't fictional either. As I sit here looking at my books and degrees (well, degree), I can't help but consider how well I'd be doing if I, err, "opened" my mind the way resident sickman Layne Staley--I mean the narrator of the song--suggests. I'll wait for my own man, thank you very much. B-
About as good as it gets with Christgau unless you're Motorhead.
Ethan Smith
Heroin lowers your testosterone too, could further worsen depression in the long run and cloud your judgement.
Robert Nelson
Idris Elba or a woman
Jacob Sanders
Hard to rationalize a junkie needing prescription painkillers. He would have OD'd either way and could have treated his pain without Opiates.
Adam Lee
Imagine being a loser outcast then one day you record a hit and suddenly the people coming to watch you perform are the Chads who beat you up in highschool and the Stacy's who laughed at you when you tried to talk to them.
Henry Rogers
And then the record company sees a spike in sales and strongarms you to start writing songs for your new audience, the people you absolutely fucking despite. No wonder he blew his brains out.
Isaac Ward
>B- so a 10/10 basically
Hudson Howard
most artists are damaged people. it's always been this way and always will be. and a lot of damaged people romanticize their depression and drug addiction, and people fall for the romance of it, like with burroughs, he wrote books that made addiction seem dangerous and cool when in reality it's dying and losing control of your muscles and bowels. layne told friends he was shitting himself before he died. there's nothing fun about it, but they romanticize it because it becomes an obsession and the closer you are to death the more you start to see things abstractly and invent synchronicities and things that aren't there and lose touch with the horror of the reality
