Music meme: day 25 of 30
Mar. 6th, 2018 10:53 amThis meme was supposed to take place over a month in May 2017, but I'm having fun working through it really slowly!
I have reached
I've never been one to be hugely affected by celebrity deaths but Cobain's suicide when I was 15 was a defining event. Disapproving adults called him a typical selfish, out-of-control rockstar, and it was only years later that I really knew just how awful his childhood had been even if he did make unimaginable amounts of money as a musician. To me and my teenage friends his death somehow felt like a victory for the forces of despair over what might have been a meaningful rebellion and fresh start. I wouldn't want to definitely stake a claim that Cobain was real and sincere when everything around was just marketing, but it felt that way.
He was mythologized almost immediately, as a kind of martyr to the 90s version of youth culture and rebellion. It didn't hurt that he looked a lot like the standard image of Jesus in Western art. I never really felt that anything was won through his death, though, and to me, Nirvana's almost-surreal lyrics had always been against the idea that life is ultimately meaningful. His death was pointless, just like the deaths of any number of deeply disturbed young people who didn't happen to be famous musicians.
But anyway, I changed my mind partway through the meme because Chris Cornell died in while I was in the middle of filling it out. Maybe suicide, maybe some kind of adverse drug reaction. Either way, Cornell was someone who was open about his severe mental health problems and his illness ultimately killed him. He made it to 50, too old to be glamorous.
So, in memoriam: Fourth of July by the incomparable Soundgarden. ( video embed, actually audio only )
I have reached
a song by an artist no longer living, and from the beginning of the meme I'd been intending to pick Lithium by Nirvana. I am just exactly the age to have been really into Nirvana and to be fascinated by Cobain, much to the disapproval of adults around me at the time.
I've never been one to be hugely affected by celebrity deaths but Cobain's suicide when I was 15 was a defining event. Disapproving adults called him a typical selfish, out-of-control rockstar, and it was only years later that I really knew just how awful his childhood had been even if he did make unimaginable amounts of money as a musician. To me and my teenage friends his death somehow felt like a victory for the forces of despair over what might have been a meaningful rebellion and fresh start. I wouldn't want to definitely stake a claim that Cobain was real and sincere when everything around was just marketing, but it felt that way.
He was mythologized almost immediately, as a kind of martyr to the 90s version of youth culture and rebellion. It didn't hurt that he looked a lot like the standard image of Jesus in Western art. I never really felt that anything was won through his death, though, and to me, Nirvana's almost-surreal lyrics had always been against the idea that life is ultimately meaningful. His death was pointless, just like the deaths of any number of deeply disturbed young people who didn't happen to be famous musicians.
But anyway, I changed my mind partway through the meme because Chris Cornell died in while I was in the middle of filling it out. Maybe suicide, maybe some kind of adverse drug reaction. Either way, Cornell was someone who was open about his severe mental health problems and his illness ultimately killed him. He made it to 50, too old to be glamorous.
So, in memoriam: Fourth of July by the incomparable Soundgarden. ( video embed, actually audio only )
