James, "Johnny Yen"

Kurt Cobain died by suicide on April 5, 1994.  He was found three days later, on April 8.  Here’s MTV’s Kurt Loder reporting this news:

April 8, 1994 was a beautiful spring day—or it was in New Jersey, at any rate.  I was a junior in college.  I remember walking up The Street in the afternoon, back toward campus, trying to work through my feelings about Kurt and Nirvana.  I had never been a fan of either.  I could acknowledge that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Apple Music, Spotify) was a terrific rock song.  You’d have to be some kind of stubborn asshole to be withholding on that point.  But beyond that I didn’t get the Seattle scene, the music never appealed to me, and I had a real problem with what Nirvana’s shooting star had done to rock music and youth culture more broadly.  On that last point, it sounds like Kurt—and I mean Cobain here, not Loder—might well have agreed.  But we can leave this here, as my thoughts on grunge will be (sort of) addressed in another post.

As I walked back to my dorm room in the spring sunshine, a big part of me just felt lousy.  Lousy first of all about all the time and effort I’d spent slagging off Nirvana over the years.  But lousy, too, that this man had been left just standing in a world that was so cold—a world that, for as hard as it tries to celebrate and reward its artists for their work, can’t seem to avoid killing so many of them.  This was my generation’s first Big One.  Many more would follow: a disproportionate number from that same Seattle grunge scene, as it turned out, but also Michael and Whitney and Dolores and Tom and Prince.  With each new casualty we would wonder why they couldn’t just be happy, and from the outside looking in we would restart the conversation all over again, asking what exactly it is about attention, notoriety—adulation, even—that is so damaging to people.

Disorientation is one answer. Art is a slog, if you’re committed to it. You scrape and fight, day after day, tapping your soul for something new and different and expressive. Once you’ve finally extracted that raw material, you still need to beat the hell out of it, to shape it into a final product. This is mine, you declare. I made this, out of me. Maybe a few people take notice of the Fragments of Self you’ve torn out of your chest and molded into something appropriate to show them. You connect with that small audience, and the rest of the world turns up its nose. But then something clicks and you’re a success. Everything you’ve understood about artistic expression turns on a dime. You have an interested audience, suddenly, and in a case like Cobain’s, millions of dollars of value rain down from nowhere on your crudely molded Fragments. Or so I imagine. I would expect a turn of events like this would set a guy reeling.

Fame comes with expectations, too. You’ve done it once, now do it again. Production—the constant mining for ideas, the brutal, iterative process of refining them—is no less of a slog, but now you’re on the clock, and your fans are clamoring and waiting for more (ahem, GRRM). And you have to find time, energy, and inspiration for this work amid the many enjoyable distractions that come, at least initially, with fame and fortune. The pressure might even build to a point where you ask yourself: can I keep this up? (Again, I’m only supposing …)

The flipside of fame is exposure. Everybody knows you, which is great, but also everybody knows you, which can suck. Anonymity is out the window, and privacy is a pipe dream. You’re recognized when you’re walking down the street, the media is all up in your business, and what you were previously comfortable expressing to dozens or hundreds through your art is known now to millions. Stop looking at me. Just STOP.

Oh, and here come the wolves. Predators who see you as a meal ticket, and possibly as the meal itself. ALL YOU PEOPLE ARE VAMPIRES! Alex Turner sang (Apple Music, Spotify) on the Arctic Monkeys’ first record, when they were on the climb and everybody wanted a piece of them. See also, e.g., “Billie Jean” (Apple Music, Spotify). They come to you in sheep’s clothing, with sweet talk, contracts, business opportunities, little glass bottles with white powders in them. Not very much of what they’re offering is in your best interest.

Disorientation.  Expectations.  Exposure.  Predation.  Each of these is a plausible explanation for why celebrity wrecks celebrities, but under close scrutiny none of them supplies a fully satisfying answer.  Maybe it’s not just one of these things that leads to real harm; maybe the trouble comes only when two or more of them get involved.  And maybe this explains why not every famous person succumbs to drugs, alcohol, depression, psychosis, narcissism, delusion, nervous exhaustion. 

Or maybe the fact that we’re continuing to maybe our way around this issue—that the evidence of destructive effect of celebrity is so abundant, yet we continue to struggle to piece together exactly why—is itself the actual answer to the question.  Those of us looking in from the outside can’t make any sense of the psychology of the fame experience.  Supercharged fame is a Looking Glass, doubling as a Black Hole. We’re all drawn to it, and the lived experience of most of us is to circle around it, watching as a select few others—lucky or unlucky—actually get to pass through the portal into an altered state of being.  Having arrived on the Other Side, they find that they’re still with us, and we with them, but we just don’t relate anymore. It’s a fame thing: you wouldn’t understand.  That lack of understanding is the very fame thing we don’t understand, and off we go around a recursive feedback loop of disconnection.  And so Major Tom drifts ever further off in space (Apple Music, Spotify), and even (and I’d say especially) the greatest stars end up despising themselves in that Looking Glass (Apple Music, Spotify).¹

I could have chosen “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for this post. That song was, after all, the Looking Glass for Kurt Cobain, the point of artistic singularity that swallowed Nirvana first, then hair metal, then Top 40 R&B and most everything else passable as pop music, before disgorging Stone Temple Pilots and Alice in Chains back on our plates in a puddle of ectoplasm, charged ions, and spit.  But you see now that even gesturing in the direction of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—great song, GREAT SONG—is triggering for me, sending me off-topic in mid-sentence and halfway up my high horse sputtering about grunge.  Again: I’m determined to save that grunge critique for later.

Far better, then, to call out “Johnny Yen” (Apple Music, Spotify) by James, an absolute banger of a song in its own right that has nothing in common with grunge. This one’s off their first album, Stutter, which wasn’t available in the U.S. except on import. Accordingly, the first handful of times I heard this song James were playing it live. When James plays “Johnny Yen” in concert, they do it up right and it looks and sounds like this:

The end-of-song monologue from vocalist Tim Booth varies with each performance. I think he sticks the landing best on this live recording (YouTube) from the appropriately named “Unhinged” album, which unfortunately isn’t on the streamers.

Until about a minute ago I had always assumed that James’s “Johnny Yen” was an homage to Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” (Apple Music, Spotify), which provides as follows:

Here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquor and drugs and a flesh machine. He’s gonna do another striptease.

Turns out Iggy was himself borrowing the Johnny character from William Burroughs, who it’s fair to conclude was directly influential on Tim Booth and James, given that they named a B-side (YouTube) after him. In any case, James’s “Johnny Yen” deals precisely with the subject of fame, the destruction of the famous (self- or other-induced), and the thrill we derive from watching these trains go from running on time to wrecked and smoldering:

See Houdini and his underwater tricks: you were sitting at the front hoping his locks would stick. Watch Knievel hit the 17th bus: you got crushed in the souvenir rush.

Tim Booth is a lyrical genius, and his preacher-man vocal style and off-beat imagery fit perfectly with the manic and beautiful music his bandmates deliver on bass, drums, guitar, violin, and trumpet. Live, there’s nobody better than James, and I’ve crossed the Atlantic three times to have a look at them on UK tours. For their part, James’s fame is well-modulated: enough to keep them going well into their fourth decade, but never quite so much as to consume them. It surely helps, too, to have taken account of the danger early on—still better to have written that warning into a song and then perform it regularly at shows for the next forty years.

I don’t know that I’ve reached any useful conclusions here, other than that great art rightly commands attention, but the ensuing attention can destroy the artist. This is the trap—the bitter irony that burned down Kurt Cobain and so many others like him. Or as Tim puts it:

Ladies and gentlemen, here’s my disease. Give me a standing ovation and your sympathy.

1. Kraftwerk sang this truth from a safe space, having worked hard to craft an aesthetic that depersonalized their music and drew attention away from its creators. Might be they saw what fame had done to Bowie and Iggy … or maybe they just knew better from the jump.