Unapologetic Addicts, Dead Heroes

Alice In Chains as a terminal process

This is part 2 of Litverse’s Expression Economy series. Read Part 1 here.

Layne Staley, lead vocalist of Seattle grunge sensation Alice In Chains, missed the 27 club by seven years. After his last appearance with Alice In Chains in 1996 at 29, he was found dead at 34 on April 19, 2002. His accountants suspected something was wrong: he hadn’t withdrawn money for two weeks. When the police entered his home, they found decomposed remains. In his final moments, the six-foot Staley weighed 86 pounds.

Last week, we talked about Taylor Swift’s popularity among the trauma generation and why listening to your favorite sad music might be bad for you. Today, we’ll expand that thesis to the nineties: when it wasn’t anxiety that was in vogue, but nihilism.

Pre-Tech Pacific Northwest Pain

Along with Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, Alice In Chains defined a new sound of disassociation and the last time Seattle would ever have anything resembling a personality beyond cannabis, e-commerce, and code. Formed in Seattle in 1987, the band’s albums Facelift (1990), Dirt (1992), Jar of Flies (1994) and Alice In Chains (1995) left a footprint as big as a dinosaur in nineties rock - flashing like a meteor and leaving echoes of light lasting eons.

One of the big debates between the grunge gurus of a certain age is whether the MTV Unplugged performance of Nirvana (1993) or Alice In Chains (1996) is better. Whatever the verdict, both performances have a sacrificial air: we are seeing both Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Alice in Chain’s Layne Staley give their souls on stage. Lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Cantrell shows the expression of anyone who is unsure of whether they’re seeing the real person or the drugs in every song during Staley’s 1996 performance.

While Nirvana produced power anthems for the slacker generation, Alice In Chains wrote anthems for addicts. Staley sang his suffering without once pretending at a solution. The arc of most songs paint the portrait of a man surrendering to the power of something greater than himself - drugs - and then push us back to where we started by talking about how being addicted isn’t that bad and drugs are too good to stop doing.

As Staley puts it in 1992’s “Junkhead:”

Seem so sick to the hypocrite norm
Running their boring drills
But we are an elite race of our own
The stoners, junkies and freaks

Are you happy? I am, man
Content and fully aware
Money, status, nothing to me
'Cause your life is empty and bare, yeah

What's my drug of choice?
Well, what have you got?
I don't go broke
And I do it a lot

In a song like “Angry Chair,” we see this dynamic at play: the song is tense, angry, mournful - but triumphant in the disassociation itself.

As Staley sings:

Loneliness is not a phase

Field of pain is where I graze

Serenity is far away

…

Saw my reflection and cried, hey

So little hope that I died, oh

Feed me your lies, open wide, hey

Weight of my heart, not the size, oh

…

I don't mind, yeah, I don't mind, I-I-I

I don't mind, yeah, I don't mind, I-I-I

Lost my mind, yeah, but I don't mind, I-I-I

Can't find it anywhere, I don't mind, I-I-I

Life is tough, but it doesn’t really matter. Live in a lonely field of pain? Cry whenever you see your reflection? Staley doesn’t mind. By 1996, he tried to make it clear on MTV’s “Unplugged” performance with the debut “The Killer Is Me.” This was the band’s second-to-last performance with Staley before he disappeared into himself.

How determined was Staley to not overcome his addiction?

Just take a look at his career in the supergroup “Mad Season” (1995) which released one album that immediately went gold and included the incisively insightful songs “Wake Up,” where he sang:

Wake up young man, it's time to wake up
Your love affair has got to go, for ten long years
For ten long years, the leaves to rake up
Slow suicide's no way to go, oh

Guitarist Mike McCready, of Pearl Jam, formed the group after meeting bassist John Baker Saunders in rehab in the hopes that being around sober musicians would get Staley sober. He named the band “Mad Season” to represent the “seasons” of drinking and drug abuse. The album is a haunting reflection on addiction that stands as a warning to anyone addicted to anything. Despite the effort, Saunders died of an overdose in 1999. Staley died three years later.

The songs are sung by ghosts, not gurus, and the legacy of loss left behind by Alice In Chains and Mad Season leave the listener haunted, instead of heroic.

Product V. Process

Last week, Litverse talked about how Taylor Swift’s songs are a product, not a process, because the listener comes out the same way they started. A trauma generation confuses the consumption of old moods with transformation because Swift provides a buffet of break-up songs to appease her audience.

In 2024’s Bad Therapy, author Abigal Shrier proposes a simple idea: thinking too much and talking too much about bad feelings makes us feel bad, not good. In hearing this theory, I started to wonder how this translated to music: does listening to sad music make us sadder? Should I not be blasting Alice In Chains at the gym given the side effects?

Sad songs make us feel softer feelings. Research has proven it.

If sad songs make us feel “sadness” fifty percent of the time and we make that sadness a regular soundtrack, does that sadness seep into our life in the same way Shrier claims therapy does? Do sad songs make us obsessed with sadness as enlightenment? If Swifties are addicted to break-up anthems, doesn’t it stand to reason that the same goes for grunge listeners who listen to bands playing songs of disassociation? Is this a group who consumes sadness and doesn’t realize these songs are just as bad for their health as Panera’s discontinued “Charged Sips” drinks?

@sarahebaus@Panera Bread this drink should come with a warning because it’s delicious and will lead to my cardiac arrest #panerabread #mangoyuzucitrus #remotework

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In vulnerable moments, we can find peace relating to songs of disassociation. But what if it’s available all the time? Should we still be listening with such recklessness, given that songs are remote controls for our mood? Listening to addiction anthems, should the listener beware?

Dead Heroes, Defeated Heroes

Staley sang about addiction and consumed himself. As his mother, Nancy McCallum, recalls:

It got to a point where he'd kept himself so locked up, both physically and emotionally. I kept trying to make contact...Three times a week, like clockwork, I'd call him, but he'd never answer. Every time I was in the area, I was up in front of his place yelling for him ... Even if you could get in his building, he wasn't going to open the door. You'd phone and he wouldn't answer. You couldn't just kick the door in and grab him, though there were so many times I thought about doing that. But if someone won't help themselves, what, really, can anyone else do?

A genre-defining act of the grunge scene, Staley left a legacy larger than life after dying in obsolete oblivion. In the music of Alice In Chains, listeners hear pain as a product but not a process. We visit Staley in a prison he never escaped: the songs are an experience of expression, not transformation, and should be applied with caution. In this view, many legends of the rock industry that listeners think are better than Taylor Swift are just selling songs of alienation, anger, and antipathy that sound like everything but often go nowhere (I stand by the fact that Rage Against the Machine is in this category).

When art shows no light at the end of tunnel, the light is just a reflection. You never see the way out because seeing yourself as you are, enough times, can feel like transformation anyway. There is comfort in art as a product and with Alice In Chains, the listener consumes the feeling of alienation and there is a comfort, a company, in the tone of hopelessness because Staley still followed the number one rule of artistry: authenticity. He was honest with the audience from the start and never even pretended to change.

But there’s another dead hero to note who followed a similar formula and shocked every one of his fans when he took his own life at the age of 41: Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington. In the last part of the Expression Economy series (June), we’ll examine why everyone should have seen Bennington’s fate coming… and why your favorite music really might just be bad for you, if used without moderation.

Do you engage with art as a product or a process? Is your favorite music a trough or a transformation? Do you want to just visit an emotion or do you want to wrestle it to the ground? Does it matter?

Missed Part 1 of the Expression Economy? Read Taylor Swift and The Trauma Generation.

Want to get mad about Litverse’s interpretations about punk, new wave, and the machine millionaires who are members of Rage Against the Machine? Read The Pointlessness of Punk.