First off, as a newcomer to this blog, let me introduce myself. My name is Adam. Though I may be the shortest tenured and perhaps least heralded of the Collegian’s senior music reporters, I’m a feisty up-and-comer looking to prove my mettle.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this.
I’m a huge Elliott Smith fan, so I won’t even hesitate to listen to all of it (and I’ll probably really like the music), but I can’t help but wonder what it will do to how I feel about him as an artist.I often ask myself the question, “What if?” when it comes to a lot of bands and musicians. What if this rock band was still together, or what if that singer-songwriter never killed himself—what would they have done? Sometimes, like in the case of At the Drive-In members forming the Mars Volta, one great band can spawn another one, but this is a rarity in the grand scheme of things. More often than not, I find myself feeling bitter and wondering about what could have been.
It happens in the sports world, too: What if Barry Sanders hadn’t quit in his prime, if Bo Jackson hadn’t divided his focus between football and baseball or if Shawn Kemp had never discovered the effects that copious amounts of cocaine have on the human body. But with music, it’s a little different.
With an athlete, the player inevitably retires, and as legendary as he may be, he will always be confined by the context in which he succeeded. You can watch highlights of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and recognize he was a dominant player, but when you see his short little shorts and his ridiculous goggles, you know he was from a different time. While you can’t see most bands from the 1960’s play live anymore, you can still listen to them in the same capacity that fans from nearly half a century ago listened to them. As a result, truly great music carries with it a certain unequivocal timelessness that makes it continue to matter on the same level. For example, the Beatles are as relevant now, decades after they broke up, as they were when they were actually together—if not more so.
Sometimes a band breaks up, or a musician dies, or sometimes they simply can’t bring themselves to make music anymore. In all these cases, though, it reminds us just how taxing—emotionally and creatively—it is to be an artist in the spotlight. It’s something I take for granted when actually listening to something like Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea or Jeff Buckley’s Grace, but at the same time, it’s something that lends a certain mystique to these kinds of albums without which they just wouldn’t be the same, and it’s something that sometimes makes me feel like crying when the music stops.
There’s a line in a Neil Young song (“Hey Hey, My My”) that says “It’s better to burn out/Than to fade away.” More than 25 years later, Young has ignored his own wisdom and continues to make music.In 1994, Kurt Cobain ended his suicide note (and, obviously, his musical career) with the same lyric. While Young is thought of as one of the most influential artists of the last 50 years, Cobain (along with Nirvana and Nevermind) is iconic, and it has everything to do with the fact that only one of the two is still alive.
I’m not saying Neil Young should have killed himself—he’s made some great music, and he’s probably a pretty decent guy who deserves to live. What I’m saying is that if he had killed himself, or if he had found some other tragic way to end his musical career and had abruptly stopped playing while he was still at his peak, his music would be looked at in a profoundly different way.
If the Beatles hadn’t broken up, or if Jeff Mangum hadn’t had a nervous breakdown, or if Elliott Smith were still alive, maybe they’d all still be making more incredible music. Or maybe they wouldn’t. There’s absolutely no way of knowing—and this can be extremely frustrating—but it’s this very uncertainty that comes from wondering about the music they could have or would have made that makes listening to the music they actually did make an engaging, reverent and wholly powerful experience.
