Music meme: day 25 of 30

[liv]

This 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 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.

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Comments

[worlds_of_smoke]

Chris Cornell's death hit me pretty hard, even harder than Kurt's or, really, any of the other amazing voices we've lost. I knew he had a history of addiction, but it didn't seem like he was constantly relapsing. Kurt, Shannon Hoon (Blind Melon), Layne, and Scott Weiland all struggled with drugs. So their deaths hurt, but they weren't a surprise. Even Kurt's wasn't all that surprising. The only thing that surprised me was that his depression got him first.

Chris' death was an absolute surprise, and I still can't listen to any of his music, with the exception of the rare Temple of the Dog song. Chris' wife is certain that it was an accidental overdose because he had said that he had taken some extra Ativan and wasn't depressed in any way. I think that another reason it hit me hard is Ativan is what I'm on for panic attacks, so it was a huge reminder that you don't fuck around with psych meds.

Honestly, with every amazing voice from my teenage years we lose, my heart breaks a little bit more. All I gotta say is that Eddie Veddar better live to 100. (And I'm not even a huge PJ fan!) He's the last of the amazing voices that quite literally kept me alive through the hell that was my teenage years.

(As an aside, Kurt's death convinced me not to commit suicide, just because I saw how it impacted the world. I mean, I didn't have a huge world-wide fanbase, of course. But the reaction to his suicide really opened my eyes to what mine would've done to my family. I still came close a couple times, but he kept saving me.)

[sfred]

<3
Yes, all of this.

[lethargic_man]

FWIW, I've a friend who's absolutely convinced that Cobain's death was not suicide but murder; when I asked who killed him, she replied "Who stood the most to gain?" If you're interested, you can I'm sure read all about it on the Net of a Million Lies; the problem will of course be sieving the possible from the conspiracy theories...