Love, Shame, and Scott Weiland
“Oh god, no… I was obsessed with him when I was 12.” — me
“…I am getting a more complete picture of you every day...” —my new boss
Unless you’re one of the few people who knew me in middle school, you might not know that my number one crush was and still kind of is Scott Weiland.
Over the past week since the Stone Temple Pilots singer died on December 3rd, articles have poured out both in homage, and in guarded praise of the frontman’s tumultuous life. Initial pieces were quick to dub him one of the most iconic voices of the 90s, while those that came out later (especially one penned by his ex wife in Rolling Stone) called for us to cease glorifying of someone with a less-than-stellar record as a partner and family man. Weiland was 48 at the time of his death, and for all intents and purposes, didn’t exactly die prematurely, given his penchant for partying, heroin, and regularly squeezing into women’s jeans. He did, however, leave behind a bunch of sad-faced, not-entirely-shocked individuals in their 30s and 40s who had grown up listening to his raspy, soulful croon and seizure-like antics on stage. I am one of these people.
But this is not another piece about Weiland’s genius, or even his impact on the music scene. This is a piece about his impact on me, and what I learned about love and shame at an extremely impressionable time in my life.
Unlike most people who commented on his death, I am relatively young. A whole 16 years younger than Weiland himself, most music writers and social commentators were approximately his peers, at least in age. Not to mention, at the height of his popularity (mid/early 90s) I was in the most soul-crushing, dishonest-to-yourself stage in anyone’s life: middle school.
You might be able to save yourself from high school by attending some progressive utopia-or-hellhole institution where general no-nos like sexual ambiguity and individuality as a whole are praised and even encouraged (realistically, you might have better luck just dropping out), but no one can avoid the cultural void that is middle school. Every drop of uniqueness that differentiates you from others is immediately uncovered and belittled by hormone-enraged bullies and premature mean girls. To survive, rather than rise above and lend a hand to the lepers (ok ok, I know Che Guevara was a murderer and all, but still (oh right… Jesus!)), you find the one person even weirder than yourself and pay the shitting-upon forward. Everyone sucks in middle school.
On top of acting like a complete asshole, you look like a complete asshole — asynchronous growth spurts, unwelcome surprises protruding from your forehead (as well as your pants), and for girls, it was a time when you started looking like an adult, but were too young (as determined by your parents) to start acting like one by, say, using makeup and hair products, shaving your legs, or basically being allowed to appear as the hot grown-up you thought you were. Life sucks and you want to die.
One of the biggest ways to bond with anyone, at any age, is to have shared interests. In middle school, all that interested me and my friends was boys, “My So-Called Life” (mostly because of the hot boys), and shopping at 5–7–9 (in case we ran into any hot boys). So naturally, I was horrified to disclose that the hottest boy to me was one that looked kind of like a girl. In my mind, comparing Weiland to other major heartthrobs of that time wasn’t that far off — Gavin Rossdale was a fellow rocker in tight pants, and both Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio had feminine features and long, flaxen hair. But Gavin (who was given the ever-clever pen name “Gay-vin” by my jealous peers) was dating babe of all babes Gwen Stefani, and Brad and Leo never gyrated on stage with plucked eyebrows and makeup. Scott Weiland was the perfect storm of all things ambiguous and beautiful. At least he was to me, and apparently only me.
The person you have a crush on defines you in a lot of ways. On matters of personal taste, it’s always easier to go with the crowd rather than risk ostracism by favoring something (or someone) deemed undesirable or even simply unnoteworthy. Like middle school girls, the boys too favored the common babes — Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Geller*, um, Sandra Day O’Connor — if you had three names, a girl-next-door face, and voted inoffensibly centrist, you qualified! I always attributed all the popular jocks fawning over the same boring girls in our class year after year to this very effect, and not, say, choosing me instead (contrary to my mother’s opinion, having a “nose full of character” was only desirable in the Middle Ages and by the occasional white-boys-with-gypsy-fetishes in my 30s). Even as we grow up, the most we can do is fall into buckets preapproved as acceptable choices. Team Jen vs. Team Angie. Team Edward vs. Team Jacob. Team Alito vs. Team Scalia. But who was on Team Weiland?
No one was on Team Weiland. I disclosed my crush to my two closest friends, who while incredulous, didn’t ditch me (one of whom, 20 years later, sent me a text with condolences last Friday). I tested the waters with those outside my immediate circle (triangle) and even by the unpopular crowd was told “that guy is gay!” Shamefully, I tried to clarify “no no, I think it’s their guitarist who’s gay.” (Sorry, Dean DeLeo.) I never dared to put up a photo of just him in my locker, but rather the whole band, pretending that it was all about the music. This was believable given their radio popularity, but in reality, no one was a die-hard STP fan. Nirvana had their well-deserved cult, and Pearl Jam was by far the leader of the sexy-frontman Seattle rock niche (I was a fan of both, and still get a male diva grunge boner when I watch the “Hunger Strike” video, especially when Chris Cornell’s head almost explodes at the end). But STP? To most, they were a good for a solid handful of hits, and that was it. To me though, I had to be obsessed with the music, as anything outside of that would be socially unacceptable — the worst fate of all in middle school.
But does it really end in middle school? As mentioned earlier, as we grow older, we find a wider variety of looks attractive, but tend to still argue differences amongst unanimously hot people (once again reprising my now only partial-pariah role, I am apparently the only person on Team Bill for True Blood). When it moves beyond celebrities and turns to real people we’d actually want to date, it’s even worse. Anytime one of my girlfriends discloses a crush on someone we’re familiar with, most reactions are still “him?? ugh, so not my type.” It’s enough judgment to make an otherwise fun game of kill/marry/fuck turn into a fearful guessing game of what the crowd will approve of (and then later, after choosing an unpopular “fuck”, rebuffing the unsuspecting gentleman overtly in real life just in case anyone thought you were serious). It’s no different with people we don’t mutually know. Despite my friends being exceptionally warm and supportive on the whole, I still get nervous to show them a picture of an upcoming date (always requested) and sometimes even lie, saying I don’t have one, to avoid any soft fumbling for compliments (“aw, he looks really nice!”)
Earlier this year, I was hanging out with a couple of friends when randomly, a guy I had recently hooked up with walked by and stopped to chat for a bit. While we were talking, I was afraid he’d say something to disclose our intimate history, in front of my friends, in broad daylight when all his (and my) flaws were on plain view. He didn’t, and moments after he walked away, my friend said “damn… why don’t I ever run into guys who look like that??” What followed was remarkable — this green light of approval immediately transformed me into an adolescent, a high school quarterback recounting entirely too many details of what now was my personal conquest, my trophy. Like an animal, I was marking my territory at the same time, proudly showing off my prize while essentially telling the other girls to back off. And yet I am almost entirely certain that had she said “who’s that?” or not said anything at all, I too would’ve remained silent and changed the subject.
Why is attraction so important? This is a ridiculously huge question with roots in evolutionary theory, none of which I’ll get into now given I know “nothin’ about nothin’”**, and per my previous posts, research is hard. Though maybe the question isn’t attraction, but approval. Why does it matter at all that your friends approve of your mates, or even something as simple as a crush? Disclosing such personal information is a gateway to getting close to someone, and yet far too often, our initial response is criticism. Even when we meet someone’s significant other who seems good, our instinct is to talk with other mutual friends about him/her in hopes of uncovering and agreeing upon something undesirable. The obvious answer is that it’s a way to protect our own choices — your best friend has a new boyfriend and you don’t, but it’s only because you would never date someone like him anyway. With male friends’ girlfriends, even if you had zero interest in them, part of you feels slighted that they didn’t spend their life pining over you instead. Maybe it’s just girls. Maybe girls really are the worst.
The past week, I’ve been furiously watching videos of Scott Weiland, something made possible with the modern ubiquity of online content, something I could not do on-demand when my crush raged in earnest in the 90s. While it’s nice to see countless comments sharing similar feelings of well wishes that he may be in a better place now, I couldn’t help but notice the immense amount (ok slight exaggeration) of attention on his good looks. Countless commenters likened him to a young Clint Eastwood (to which my 12-year-old self says “gross!”) And to which my 32-year-old self says where the hell were you assholes when I was ostracized in middle school, leaving me to fake-drool through my braces at Freddie Prinze Jr. instead so that I could still have friends?
Loving Scott Weiland when no one else did, was a test that I both passed and failed at the same time. I passed in that I didn’t keep it completely secret from everyone, and even made now-appalling statements in defense of his behaviors. One such moment was when after being mostly vegetarian for about a year on the platform of animal rights***, I gave it up upon hearing a soundbite on MTV News about how an activist group was angry with STP for the rape-suggestive lyrics of “Sex Type Thing” (which apparently were an anti-rape statement, according to the band). In my mind, these two things were linked — activists could be misguided, Scott Weiland was perfect, and more importantly, I really wanted a steak.
But I also failed the test in that I never fully owned up to my liking something that was not like the other. Everyone knows children are cruel, but so are adults, myself included. I’ve become so critical, I barely have crushes anymore, and I definitely think the two are linked. The way a child will fearlessly yell out “POOPIE!” in the middle of a sermon, or disclose the absurd and fantastic links in their brain with no worries of disapproval (see This American Life’s episode Kid Logic for a great exploration on the topic), refraining too much from that way of thinking leaves us with no imagination at all. I don’t mean to suggest we all collectively admit to having rubbed one out to Larry King, but maybe if one of us did, could we all reply with something a bit more than “aw, he looks really nice!”?
*Who incidentally starred alongside a gratuitously shirtless Weiland in the 1999 video for “Sour Girl”.
**Anna Nicole Smith, another babe of the 90s!
***Actually, I just thought Babe was really cute, as well as the baby cows in City Slickers.
