2023-11-04 23:42:24
The cemeteries are full of musicians who died earlier than expected. And bookstores continue to be filled with biographies that gloss and sometimes glorify the close relationship between music, alcohol and drugs. Bodies. Life and death in music (Liburuak), by British journalist Ian Winwood, goes one step further and tries to explain the reason for this link. “The dots are never connected; It is worked on a case by case basis and the full story is never told. So there it goes. There is something systematically wrong in the world of music. And it makes people sick,” he teases in the first few pages. Bodies takes on the challenge of explaining what is wrong in the music industry that causes so many artists to fall by the wayside.
The mental health traffic light among musicians clearly indicates ‘danger’
Ian Winwood knows what he means when he talks about rock, drugs and alcohol. Not only because he has been dedicated to music journalism for three decades and has signed publications such as The Guardian, Kerrang, NME y Rolling Stone (in addition to books about Metallica or American punk), but because he himself has tasted huge doses of alcohol and drugs. Just one detail to illustrate the more than close links between the music industry and narcotics: for a time Winwood’s dealer was a guy who had worked as road manager for Primal Scream. In Bodies, Winwood talks about his own dramatic experience and connects it with that of dozens of groups that went through their particular ordeal in the show business and they lived to tell it.
Winwood’s book is much more than an anecdote of extreme situations experienced by artists like Metallica, Biffy Clyro, Green Day, Lostprophets and Frank Turner. Bodies It functions rather as a mirror to a music industry that for decades has behaved like a large dysfunctional and deeply irresponsible family, a work environment that has assumed as normal dynamics that would be totally unacceptable in any other professional sector. “Frank Turner says that he has spent his entire life working in an environment where it is much easier to get alcohol than fruit. If you finish all the alcohol, someone will bring you more, but if you order a piece of toast with cheese or a cup of coffee, things get complicated,” summarizes the journalist by telephone.
The reflection of his friend and British rocker forces us to wonder why it is so easy to get alcohol and drugs when you are a musician or move in the world of music. And this is the most consistent conclusion he has reached: “Drugs and alcohol became a necessity to survive in this business almost from its origins. Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins traveled in cars from city to city and drank speed to endure. This dynamic has never gone away. If I were slightly conspiratorial You might think that in order for the business to continue bringing benefits to the industry, it is good that this debauchery is perpetuated. rock and roller. Thus, musicians will not spend their free time consulting the account books or discovering why they receive such a small percentage of the profits. By this I don’t mean that they want musicians to die. Nobody wants that, but we have seen many times that replacements are easily found for those who die.”
sick dynamics
Through dozens of interviews with musicians who have felt on an emotional tightrope and mental health professionals, Winwood profiles an unhealthy work environment. One in which you are automatically offered alcohol even if you don’t ask for it (there is plenty in every dressing room), in which someone is always lurking around capable of getting you drugs in just 15 minutes and in which nervous breakdowns and emotional breakdowns enter. within normality. Naturalizing unhealthy behaviors and dramatic outcomes is the specialty of this industry. This explains why the rate of suicides and overdose deaths is so high. A 2012 study noted that mortality among musicians was “1.7 times higher than that of the general population in the United Kingdom and the United States.”
Drummer Grant Hutchinson, brother of Scott Hutchinson, singer of the group Frightened Rabbit who committed suicide in 2018, states in the book that the music industry “is not a safe environment for vulnerable people”
In 2018 Scott Hutchinson, singer of the group Frightened Rabbit, committed suicide after several years of emotional instability and alcohol addiction. His brother, drummer Grant Hutchinson, states in the book that the music industry “is not a safe environment for vulnerable people.” But of course, often, musicians and creative minds are just that. “Rock’n’roll was born as the music of outlaws and, therefore, attracted personalities with wild behaviors in whose music you could even perceive that way of being,” Winwood contextualizes. Another issue is what mechanisms the music industry has developed to help musicians with addiction problems. And there have been many warnings in this regard over time. As Winwood recalls, of all the singers in Seattle groups that went platinum in the early ’90s, only one survives: Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam.
In recent years, the debate on mental health has been gaining prominence in all areas. Even in the music industry. One of the voices of Bodies is the psychologist Charlie Howard, who works for companies in the music industry to monitor the mental health of bands. It is no wonder, since it is increasingly common for artists to cancel tours due to exhaustion. However, she herself has seen how the music industry itself naturalizes the most extreme habits. Pay attention to the confession made by a patient musician: “Being in a group is crazy. “I have destroyed hotel rooms and no one has told me that is not okay.”
Mental health is beginning to be so present in the music industry that there is no festival or congress for professionals that does not include its mandatory talk on this subject. Ian Winwood himself presented Bodies days ago in the latest edition of BIME in Bilbao. Indeed, a study that denounces how inhumane the music industry is towards its artists integrated into the program of activities of a global meeting of the music industry.
A psychologist or a union
Reading some passages from Bodies, especially those reporting on recent music industry initiatives to probe the health of artists, the question arises as to whether what these musicians really need is a psychologist or a union. You just have to listen to the reflection of Will Gould, leader of the Creeper group. “In the music industry, drugs and alcohol are always available. They are everywhere, all the time. You can get whatever you want. It’s like having a magic ticket to ask for everything you want, but if you want a living wage, well, that’s different.” Put bluntly: in the music industry it is much easier to obtain cocaine than decent salaries.
“It is incorrect to think that everyone in the musical environment takes drugs. In fact, most don’t,” Winwood clarifies. However, the author specifies that “it is not even necessary for you to take drugs or alcohol to end up completely collapsed.” The very dynamics of the business encourage this tendency to collapse, that mixture of exhaustion and Stockholm syndrome, the results of which can be lethal. The first commandment of show business is that the show must always go on and that giving up mid-battle can ruin your career. In creative works, the transition from exploitation to self-exploitation is almost immediate. “Maybe musicians could do something more to avoid these situations, but the rules of the game are written against them. When the groups sign their first contract, they face networks with very sophisticated structures that are experts in making the most money,” justifies the author.
“Keith Moon ruined his life,” remembers Winwood, referring to the ill-fated drummer of The Who, “but at least he made a more than decent amount of money,” he remembers to compare the situation in the 70s with today. The music industry has a great ability to squeeze musicians. He always had it, but over the years he has found new formulas. And that is the most crucial problem facing musicians in the 21st century,” he notes. ”Now they are cutting a percentage of the sales of the merchandising of the tours. It’s all tricks of this production chain in which artists are easily replaceable pieces. I don’t know how long it will continue to be like this, but new groups keep appearing all the time,” she warns.
They are usually bands of teenagers to whom it is explained that things have worked this way for decades. How is a 19-year-old kid going to deal with that? If he doesn’t see it clearly, he’ll find a bottle of Jack Daniels in the dressing room
Ian Winwood
— Periodista
Years go by and the situation seems increasingly irreversible. It’s still not a good idea to complain about the often grueling conditions in which bands’ careers unfold, traveling from city to city for months on end in endless loops of excitement and boredom. “Musicians have been dreaming for years about the possibility of accessing that situation and if they complain about something or hear a faint voice in their head suggesting that this should not work like this, they feel ungrateful. They feel that they should not complain about something that they have fought so hard for and that they wanted so much,” Winwood illustrates. “They are usually bands of teenagers or twenty-somethings to whom it is explained that things have worked this way for decades. How is a 19-year-old kid going to deal with that? If he doesn’t see it clearly, he will find a bottle of Jack Daniels in the dressing room. “That’s also what I mean when I say that the rules of the business are already written.”
The role of the press
Bodies It is an important and necessary book because it also breaks with years of journalistic inertia in which the relationship between music and addictions has been described with tremendous superficiality; when not, irresponsibility. Ian Winwood is not hiding. “We have built those myths. I myself have been attracted to that dark side. I have not reviewed articles that I wrote 20 years ago, and I hope I have not written them in a glorifying way, but I have written a lot on the subject and I have done so out of fascination.
The English author even detects harmful patterns of behavior in the union. “As music journalists, our job is to sell our readers that exciting dream. Some readers are young people who would like to form groups and want to believe that this life is exciting. That is no longer so much journalism as public relations. But if I have learned anything in these years, it is how much the line between journalism and propaganda has narrowed. When Green Day’s last album came out, all the people at Kerrang! I thought it was horrible. However, they gave him a 4 out of 5 because the group is too important and they didn’t want him to get angry. The vile lie is a common resource. By this I mean that everything in this business pushes you to affirm that in the world of music everything is desirable. And that attitude is problematic,” he assumes.
As a paid music journalist for the most influential magazines and newspapers in England, Winwood shared the tour and dressing room with dozens of bands at the peak of their careers, but here he has had fun contacting those whose lives were crushed by the machinery. of the show business and listen to their reflections. Afther read Bodies It will be difficult to continue normalizing situations of exploitation and self-destruction that have only served to perpetuate this unequal and toxic relationship between the music industry and musicians. “We must insist that health and wealth are inseparable aspects,” insists Winwood. “And by wealth I simply mean not being poor. Because the poorer you are, the worse your health will be. The physical and the mental.”
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