We lost Chris Cornell this morning – and not to be facetious about it – but at first I’d misread it: “with his band around his neck”. It seemed like an odd way to put it, but surrounded by my bandmates, hugged by them – there are worse ways to go…
Of course then I re-read it. “With a band around his neck”, “iconic grunge rocker death ruled suicide.”
I’m over idolizing my… for want of a better word… idols. Cobain was a horrible lesson as I was growing up, but was it more or less of a tragedy than losing Layne Staley to a drug overdose? The latter happened later but the former seemed a CHOICE. (prepare for one of those unthought-out rants where I try to sort my own emotions out)
Suicide can be viewed a lot of different ways, and I know that my own view of it – that it is the ultimate exercise of one’s own CONTROL is probably not a popular one. Many
friends took their own Lives. It was rumoured that my college, Maryland Institute, College of Art had moved their spring break around because they’d been able to chart suicide rates, and that keeping the students in classes, working through their issues rather than allowing them to run off and be alone away from their peers saved many Lives. All in all, though I think that choice should be a considered one, thought out and understood – not something made under the influence of depression or drugs – I think that choice should always be an option.
It’s MY Life. Your Life. Your value judgement. See Sir Terry Pratchett…
Last year we lost David Bowie. He was old, he knew it was coming. Cancer is probably one of the most horrifying ways to go, watching one’s body dissolve around you – perhaps only rivaled by Alzheimer’s, watching as one’s mind dissolves around you (as above, see Sir Terry).
David Bowie Lived a beautifully full Life and even released some remarkably haunting music accompanied by some of the most soul-rendingly surreal videos that expressed his congnizance of the coming end. I’m sure these were powerful things in and of themselves, but whether he meant it or not, showing art that seemed to so blatantly about coming to terms with his death helped me feel okay with his departure. He’d turned it into something beautiful – and I have no doubt that those closest to him received some solace in the way he’d turned his coming death into something to be faced with music and visual wizardry.
(Wizardry? Bowie is my Tesla!)
Last year we lost Prince. Sounds like he fucked up. Or his doctor did. He wasn’t planning on dying. Oops. That’s tragedy. Cry until you laugh.
Back to Kurt Cobain and his stupid shotgun – I think my views of his “choice” were somewhat dulled by watching the incredible documentary his daughter put together. “Montage of Heck” may or may not have had the mission of showing him as a child who’s evolution ceased with the “trauma” of becoming a public figure, but if that WAS the mission, it was 100% successful.
It was kind of painful to watch home videos and listen to people talk about him and feel that he felt the same things that most of us feel in our late teens – except that because of a state of arrested development perhaps brought about by the fact that he’d elevated his teen angst into a fine art he stayed in that same emotional space for a decade probably resulting in his eventual suicide.
Watching Kurt’s Life, it seemed like he had two strata of friends – enablers who were all too happy to party with him and others who were eventually pushed away by his Lifestyle, evolving past it.
Reading about Layne Staley’s death by comparison – a man whose music I admired intensely – it seemed like his friends and family had given up. He was missing for two weeks before they beat down his door, and I’ve grown wary of looking up his name for fear that there will be a picture of how they found him : reduced to an 80 pound homunculus withered in the midst of crack pipes and coke.
As a 42 year-old artist and musician, I’ve seen these men repeated in various forms around me – except none of mine had the luck to get famous before they were abandoned or enabled or simply lost. I never fell prey to addiction, never even wanted to let a drug get a chance to get its teeth into me – I hate being out of control… fear it…. because sometimes you make choices you can’t take back.
Kurt Cobain probably shot himself while under the influence of SOMETHING. Whether it was heroin or cocaine or depression – any of those chemicals will leave you dancing on the edge of a precipice. I have no doubt that if he’d been brought back the next day he would’ve immediately wanted a do-over.
Who knows how long it’d been since Staley was thinking clearly. Out of all the grunge bands, it was Alice in Chains that I’d always felt most clearly attracted to. A lot of rage, little of it clear. Incredible sounds. True muddy ferocity. More complicated than Nirvana, not as coldly mathematical as the direction of Soundgarden, not as divisively political as Rage Against the Machine – not as poppy as Pearl Jam – but going back and singing along… I’m pretty sure Staley had made just as much emotional progress as Kurt had, he just didn’t have a firearm at any key moment so it took longer.
We could talk about Scott Weiland. A guy who’d struggled with drugs for so long that I must admit, when I heard that he was dead I was shocked – because I thought he’d ODed already. Or Andy Wood. A child who’d died at the beginning of the whole grunge run – you’d have thought that everyone else would’ve gotten the message – but speaking as someone who left the drug scene before it had the opportunity to grab me because the way my friends toasted the death of a friend in high school was to do the drug that had killed him – well, sometimes the message we receive is really the wrong one. Reading about Hole, the Gin Blossoms, the singer from Blind Melon, Sublime… I guess that’s hugely the case…
And so Chris Cornell. How’d this happen to you? You had about a decade on me. You’d gotten through the rough times into the golden years of middle age…. you’ve Lived through some amazing things, seen huge audiences and you lifted the crowd up… and then you hang yourself in a hotel room after a show? I wonder how it goes – you didn’t have the voice you once did – but that’s been true for a while. Sure you didn’t feel it ending? The last song he ever performed was Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying”, so I think there probably WAS a message there – though it sounds like they’d been playing it often so it didn’t raise any alarms…
I think as I write more about this, the more it seems unfair. Cornell didn’t seem like one of the self-absorbed children that we lost to the drug-addled grunge scene… Soundgarden (or “Soundgarten” as the CNN obituary states!) always seemed like the grownup on the scene… for better or for worse. He also always wrote the uplifting tunes, the survival tunes…. some of the verging on religious tunes that I couldn’t stand because of their FAITH.
It just seems like… I’LL be the one who eventually has to come to terms with never having reached any height at all, and for the people who conquered so much, who were ROCK GODS, for THEM to look around and give up after having inspired so much – it’s a fucking cop out. I hope there’s a note. I hope there’s a reason. If this was a mistake… an oops… god DAMN it.
Follow up after spending the day working hard as a small-time musician, sending CDs and posters and emails and listening to Temple of the Dog all day…
God DAMN it. I honestly don’t know if suicide or overdose would be better. Not that what *I* think is “better” matters – but as I listen to Times of Trouble, about heroin and the spoon and the needle and the rush – and Say Hello to Heaven as Cornell simply screams and wails – these are the sounds that I’ll never even HOPE to ASPIRE to. He and his cadre of players inspired so much music, so much passion. Maybe outside of Gen X it’s seen as having inspired a generation of slackers to… slack… but that’s not what it felt like. I remember first hearing “Man in the Box” and “Smelled Like Teen Spirit” and yes – the grinding ANTHEM that was “Outshined”. I’m sure every generation gets their moment in the musical sun, when they think that only THESE artists truly give them a voice – and then within each generation, those voices inspire new voices.
Well – god DAMN it… I’m acoustic grunge and absolutely, positively proud of it.
