This is "Heroin Girl", off of Everclear's album Sparkle and Fade.
Everclear rode in on the coat-tails of Nirvana, but with much better lyrics. Art Alexakis mined his awful childhood and early adulthood for inspiration for a couple of brilliant albums in the mid 1990s, Sparkle and Fade and So Much for the Afterglow. The last "real" Everclear album was their brilliant Slow Motion Daydream which was a very '00s album made after 9/11 about the American Dream and the nightmare it was becoming, including Art's ode to John Ashcroft and the cult of 24 ("Blackjack"), his skewering of American sexual mores ("Volvo Driving Soccer Mom"), the tendency of Americans to see everything in black and white with no shades of grey ("How to Win Friends and Influence People"), etc. After that, creatively and financially exhausted, the band broke up. Art went through some hard times, joined the Scientology cult, and now seems much happier. He has a new band he calls "Everclear" that makes awful music. I'm glad Art is happier, but the new music sucks... something I've noticed about a lot of miserable artists who join Scientology, they get happier, but their work turns to crap.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
True art comes from suffering, and when artists just start pretending that there is no such thing as suffering, their endeavors are shadows of what they should be.
ReplyDeleteI would say, more accurately, that true art comes out of an attempt to *make sense* of suffering. There are some artists who have never suffered in their life, who still create great stuff because they are good observers of the world around them. There is plenty of things out there to drive your music without you personally ever having had your brother die of a heroin overdose. But as you say, simply denying suffering, or joining a religion that says that suffering is punishment for not being part of the One True Faith, ends up destroying art and turning it into drivel...
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Artistic Penguin