Why were so many of the key grunge musicians such self-destructive, dysfunctional fuckups?
Casualties:
>Kurt Cobain blows his brains out after a prolonged and very public battle with depression, drug addiction and his own conflicting impulses and ambitions >following his ex-fiancee's death, Layne Staley essentially quits life and becomes a shut-in, obliterating himself with drugs and barely ever leaving his apartment for almost a decade before finally dying one of the most grotesque deaths in rock music history >Soundgarden implode onstage and disband at their commercial and creative peak, eventually reuniting for a lukewarm nostalgia tour/album before Cornell kills himself out of the blue >Kristen Pfaff joins Hole just as they were on the verge of making it big and then promptly dies of an overdose
Near-casualties:
>Mark Lanegan eventually cleans up after years of being a Cobain/Staley-tier addict and someone who a lot of people weren't expecting to still be alive by 2000 >Mark Arm eventually cleans up after almost making a habit of routinely overdosing >Patty Schemel becomes a full-on homeless junkie for a while following her exit from Hole, eventually cleaning up and putting her life back together
Why was this sort of fatalism and deliberate self-destruction so prevalent in grunge? By comparison, all of the major Britpop musicians were just as decadent and excessive as the grunge people, and yet all of those artists are still alive and well and none of them ever even came close to ending up dead or homeless.
What is your message? What is your intent? Why do you make this bread so often?
Nathaniel Robinson
All musicians are. That's why people like them, they can relate to their miserable depressive lyrics.
William Hall
Name one (1) Britpop album as good as Dirt.
Isaac Hill
This thread again!?
It's ok, I like it
Anyway, can we appreciate Mark Lanegan's resilence and musicanship?
Noah Scott
It's a subject that I'm genuinely fascinated by.
Juan Collins
>Anyway, can we appreciate Mark Lanegan's resilence and musicanship?
I'm impressed by Lanegan's longevity and consistency as a musician, yeah. The guy has seen a lot. He was there in the mid-80s when US college rock was starting to blow up alongside bands like Sonic Youth, Husker Du, Wipers, Dino Jr. etc, he was there in the early days of the Seattle scene, he was there when that scene blew up and became this huge pop phenomenon, he was there when it all started to go sideways(IIRC he was one of the first people to show up at Cobain's house after news broke of him dying), he was there during the whole "modern rock" explosion of the early 2000s(primarily via his involvement with QOTSA), he's collaborated with a massive amount of highly respected musicians and somewhere along the way he's become an indispensable and highly respected solo artist himself. He's really had an extremely rich and rewarding life/career.
He's even got some ties to Britpop of all fucking things, as Oasis had the Screaming Trees on as openers on one of their Morning Glory-era US tours and SC were one of the few US grunge-related bands that still got respect from the UK press even once Britpop rendered grunge obsolete.
Connor Morgan
>ywn have Mark Lanegan's voice >ywn dominate the hobo/young hip style at any age like Mark Lanegan >ywn have a famous rock star go into drugs and kill himself because you are his hero and he can't be like you
>ywn make a band with your two fat brothers friends Why even live?
Kayden Smith
depressive music + being stalked by the media= drug addiction/suicide
Brandon Foster
I didn't really give any credit to STP until Weiland died desu. They were always the "manufactured grunge from California" band to me. Then he died and for some reason I gave a listen to their MTV Unplugged set and yeah, they did have some solid tunes.
This was how I heard got into Lanegan in the first place. I was hugely into Afghan Whigs but never bothered with Screaming Trees/Lanegan solo before that. Very solid album. Probably the darkest thing either Lanegan or Dulli ever recorded.
Courtney Love is a trashy broken slut but she's OUR trashy broken slut.
Wyatt Nguyen
I'm old enough to remember how people thought of Hole before the Courtney hate meme got really big. She was incredibly well respected as a musician and Live Through This was considered one of the best albums of its era. It's strange as fuck to have seen pop culture's opinion of her go from "pretty much Kurt's equal, including being a dumb junkie" to "terrible hack that's never done anything good in her life."
I mean, yeah, she's a fucking trainwreck, but Hole put out a lot of good music that pretty much no one younger than me knows about or bothers to listen to because society decided to hate Courtney Love and stop taking her seriously. It's kind of sad.
Brody Diaz
>Why was this sort of fatalism and deliberate self-destruction so prevalent in grunge? Seattle itself had a lot to do with it. Before the explosion of the tech industry in the mid to late 90s, Seattle was still a dreary city mostly built off of blue-collar industries like shipbuilding and aerospace shit through Boeing. It wasn't a bright, modern city that drew a lot of promisie the way it does now. Most of it was kind of dirty, run-down, and the constant rain made it unpleasant to live in. People came to Seattle because it was the biggest city in the region, and for UW, not because they thought it would get them anywhere.
That's the environment most of those people grew up in (except for Kurt, who was from Aberdeen, a way bigger shithole). They were white trash from broken homes that never thought they would really amount to anything. When you hand anybody like that a bunch of money, they end up self-destructing (hell, country music used to be notorious for this, too - just look at all the alcoholics), grunge musicians just had a harder time hiding it because there were less of them in the spotlight (for as big a scene as a it, there were still only a handful of bands that got huge), and the huge amount of press they got brought everything into the public. Drama sells, and when MTV can't stop talking about how everyone in the scene is a junkie, that's what people pay attention to.
Chase Scott
Did Layne Staley predict Lil Peep?
Anthony Ramirez
essentially this, the grunge sound and scene exploded and these guys went from playing depressing tunes in their garages and at bars to selling out arenas in a matter of months. the britpop guys were all extroverted party types anyway while the grunge guys seemed more like depressed introverts and not fit for a lifestyle that they had no way to escape. you already know all this stuff though OP but whatever these threads are at least music related
Austin Lopez
It's ironic how the Los Angeles guys were just as huge junkies as Nirvana, yet logged a lot fewer suicides/fatal ODs. There was Hillel Slovak and...how many others? I can't think of any.
Hudson Allen
It's pretty weird to think that all of the members of Jane's Addiction are still alive but Cornell is dead. He seemed like one of the less fucked up grunge musicians.
Christian Ortiz
LA is a rich party city with year-round sunshine and great beaches. Lot unlike Seattle.
Dylan Cooper
There's been talk about Vedder being a serious alcoholic for years now.
Saw Novoselic and Thayl last night, wanted to give those guys a hug.
Caleb King
>He seemed like one of the less fucked up grunge musicians. That was definitely one of the weirdest things about his suicide to me. One of the things that seems like a constant about Cornell in the eyes of his contemporaries was that he was always the stable one. He was always steadily employed before the music took off, could cook, and would frequently take care of the people that couldn't live with their parents, like Stone Gossard and Mark Arm. One of the reasons he and Andy Wood lived together was because everyone figured Chris would help clean him up.
This. Also remember that LA was full of people who were driven enough to actually go to a big music city to try to make their dreams happen. The people that stayed in Seattle were the fuckups who couldn't even motivate themselves to do that.
