Why do Musicians Die Young?
The 27 Club.
Well known members include Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse.
The Live Fast Die Young mystique of famous musicians is often the only scenario portrayed when a member of the music community loses their life far, far too soon. However the reality is much more complicated than that, and I want to reflect on some of the causes of this phenomenon and what we can do to make a better environment for our dear musician friends.
Self-Worth
In our hyper-capitalist world your self-worth is inextricably tied to your gross domestic output. I haven’t seen a Forbes List showing “Least Valuable Bankers of the year.” Jeff Bezos makes tons of money, therefore he is a successful business man, simple.
However art is harder to quantify, and as such trying to decipher your self-worth from your artistic output and reception on these terms gets incredibly tricky.
Imagine somebody steals your diary with all your most personal musings and posts it online. Not only that, they set up an event at your local Community Center and read it out loud to everyone in your city. Some people say its great, other people say its the stupidest thing they’ve ever heard and whoever wrote it should kill themselves immediately. Pitchfork gives it a 3.2 and calls it “pedantic and overbearing.”
This is the process of releasing an album and getting feedback for it. The feedback will undoubdetly be all over the spectrum. If you are trying to gather your self-worth from this feedback who do you believe? The haters, the fanboys, your mom?
The larger the pool of feedback, the more confusing this becomes. You will need a Buddah level of self-understanding to combat this confusion, but a lot of artists blow up big before they have a chance to get to this mental space. I mean, who really knows themselves at 18 years old?
Loneliness
“But now old friends they’re acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day.” — Joni Mitchell from “Both Sides Now”
The archetype image of a rockstar is the classic DJ in a private jet with a refrigerator full champagne and a couple of top level instagram models. Then the next post you see them holding the mic up to an adoring crowd of thousands chanting every word of their hit song. Everyone fantasizes about a life of mass adoration.
However this is not necessarily the reality. Because these people don’t KNOW you. They didn’t play baseball with you on your street growing up. They didn’t ditch school with you that one time in 10th grade and hang out at the mall. They weren’t in your Freshman year psychology office hours.
Some of these people came to your show because they saw you on youtube or heard you on the radio.
Some of these people just came to your show because their girlfriend likes you.
Some of these people are r/neckbeardthings and just came to your show to prove to themselves how much you suck.
Some of these people genuinely love what you do and come out of your performance holding a transcendent long-lasting experience from your art.
But how do you tell the difference? Again, the larger the audience, the more confusing this becomes.
A lot of being a musician is sitting on buses and trains and planes listening to podcasts or playing candy crush or whatever their personal brand of staving off stifling boredom is.
While they are on these trains and planes they are missing their high school reunions, their best friend’s annual rager in Cancun, their parent’s Christmas party with all the family, their daughter’s 5th birthday.
You may find yourself asking “what have I lost to gain this career” and you might not like the answer. And that unsettling answer might lead you to….
Drugs
Imagine that you just started a residency at your local hospital as an Anesthesiologist. After 10+ rigorous years of studying you are finally working in the trenches of your field. First day of work your colleague tells you that you get 2 grams of Ketamin per month for recreational use. At lunch time you see all your anesthesiologist colleagues taking key bumps of K before they go back to inpatient care.
Sounds pretty fucking absurd right?
However this describes drug culture as a gigging musician. The number one offender is alcohol. It is very common that as a musician just starting out you will get paid in alcohol. Free Food and Drinks what a great deal!!!????!!!
Go to pretty much any greenroom on earth and you will see a table of alcohol there. The bigger the act, the bigger the table.
You are always working at a place where people are partying, and people at parties tend to do drugs and alcohol.
Add the aforementioned loneliness and self-worth issues into the mix with a dash of exhaustion and you can see how doing drugs would be attractive in this scenario.
Now: Anybody that has done drugs before can tell you that what goes up must come down. If you have made a habit of getting drunk and high before you play, you might feel like you won’t perform the same suddenly going cold turkey. ESPECIALLY if you’re already hung over. You get to the gig feeling like shit and the solution to your shitty-feelings are waiting for you right there in the greenroom. Doing drugs is a slippery slope essentially because the problem becomes the solution becomes the problem again. The farther you fall into abyss, the harder it is to climb out of it.
Now What?
Being a musician long-term has a complex set of challenges both mental and physical.
As an audience member, we tend to take a one-dimensional, binary approach to the current mental state and physical state of an artist (Love Old Kanye, Hate MAGA Kanye), (Love sexy young D’angelo, ewww gross fat D’angelo, love sexy older D’angelo again) without necessarily taking a deeper look into the fact that these are human beings with struggles just like you, played out in the public eye (which makes it alot worse).
As a musician, sometimes we get too caught up in our competition with one another or hole ourselves too deep in our own inner sanctum to realize when someone is struggling and reach out to them.
Mental health is a hugely unrecognized problem in our modern age.
We need to be more open about it and have more conversations about it.
We need to be sensitive and aware of the struggles of people in our personal orbit.
We need to respect and nurture our mental and physical capacities. We cannot push them to the side as we make “work” a priority. This is the real work and the real priority.
Guys we have to do better.
RIP Zane Musa
RIP Mike Eyia
RIP Austin Peralta
RIP Malcom McCormick
