Rant: Overdosing Is Not A Tragedy

On December 8th, 1980, forty year old John Winston Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakotas in New York City for absolutely no reason at all. The assassin, Mark David Chapman, later admitted he did it largely because he was sick of being a nobody. Shortly after uttering the second best final words ever (“Money can’t buy life.”), melanoma spread to Bob Marley’s brain, and he died quietly. The legendary activist and singer was thirty-six. The unfortunate demises of both Lennon and Marley were tragedies: sorrowful events which cause this writer to take pity on them.

On May 25th, 1996, Sublime lead singer Bradley Nowell overdosed in a sketchy hotel room in San Francisco, California. The twenty-eight year old was sprawled out on the bed, cold and lifeless from one-too-many heroin injections. Two years earlier, a maintenance man stumbled into Kurt Cobain’s guest house and found the Nirvana lead singer slumped over, a shotgun-sized hole in his head. He was twenty-seven. The unfortunate demises of both Nowell and Cobain were frivolous: having no sound basis which cause this writer to shake his head and feel nothing.

The annals of Rock N Roll lore are filled with hundreds of talented and tortured souls. Some of them fought through the pain, some of them took the easy way out. I’m sick and fucking tired of lauding the quitters. There’s nothing poetic about dying in some godforsaken shack after systematically distancing yourself from everyone who cares. None of these self-destructive idiots rise from the ashes. They just rot in the ground–fucking dead--thanks to their only foolish and selfish choices.

Bon Scott choked on his own vomit. Shannon Hoon snorted ounces and ounces of cocaine. Robert Johnson was poisoned by a club owner after sleeping with the poor bastard’s wife. None of this is tragic. It’s pointless, unproductive, worthless, and futile. If some alcoholic toll both attendant drinks himself to death, no one justifies his collapse by calling him a brilliant, misguided sage. He’s just some asshole who found boozing easier than dealing with his problems. Ian Curtis hung himself at twenty-three because his marriage failed. Fifty percent of weddings end in divorce. This crap is the same crap everyone else in the world deals with. Having a hit record doesn’t change any of it.

If you want to worship the memory of a rock star, then go right ahead and do it, but pine over what could have been, daydream about songs which might have been written had suicide or coke or smack not seemed like a simpler alternative. Jim Morrison was a fatass who put too much white powder into his nose. The fact that he sang the vocals on “Break On Through” doesn’t change anything. Sid Vicious was a heroine addict and a shitty musician and possibly a murderer. Just because he briefly represented teenage angst doesn’t change anything. They’re both fucking dead, and when the next generation of pathetic rock stars looking for a way to cop-out on life bite the bullet, I won’t find it tragic either. I’ll find it frivolous and unsurprising.