The 27 Club: Mental Illness & Art

this video is sponsored by skillshare for a limited time use the link in the description to get a free trial of skillshare premium i turned 27 years old last week as someone whose entire life is so closely tied to popular music it's obviously a meaningful age for me many of my favorite musicians including some that i spent years of my life idolizing died at 27 years old it's a phenomenon known as the 27 club brilliant musical minds being struck down in their prime often due to addiction and mental illness the myth was born when in the space of two years brian jones jimi hendrix jim morrison and janice joplin all died at 27 years old but it's not just those four since then we've lost many more musicians at the age of 27 most notably kurt cobain and amy winehouse a favorite story that many people link to the 27 club is robert johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil and laid the foundations for rock and roll before dying at 27. indeed the myth of johnson's faustian bargain is sometimes extended into our discussions of other 27 club members and honestly i can see why it's a really compelling story torture geniuses touched by darkness who used their brief time on this planet to innovate and inspire i used to love these stories early on in polyphonic i even made an entire video on the 27 club but a few days before it was set to release i scrapped it and i'm glad that i did i don't think it was a bad video by any means it described the strange phenomenon and i was careful to talk about the tragedy of it all but still in some way even just by telling the story of the 27 club i think it would have been helping to romanticize it we pretend that we don't romanticize these things but i think a lot of us do i know i certainly used to when i was 16 years old i had big dreams i was going to be an iconoclastic rock star i sat in my room writing cheesy lyrics and blasting nirvana records i dressed as kurt cobain for halloween and watched every interview i could get my hands on i even read his journals which were published and sold years after his death without his consent i wish i could say that back then i thought the publishing of these journals was a gross violation of privacy but i didn't i loved the journals and i dreamed that someday my own teenage musings would be poured over by a new generation of would-be artists back in those days 27 felt so far off so old at 27 you could have accomplished so much and your best years were behind you anyways for a time i really believed the words that neil young wrote and kurt cobain quoted in his suicide it's better to burn out than to fade away in his autobiography waging heavy peace neil young described the effect that finding out about cobain's suicide note had on him when he died and left that note it struck a deep cord inside of me it [ __ ] with me when cobain died neil young had actually been trying to reach out to him trying to help him cope with the pressures of stardom but cobain never got to have that meeting with one of his idols i don't believe that it's better to burn out than to fade away anymore i dream of fading away slowly dropping out of the spotlight and living a good long life with close family and good friends 27 doesn't feel quite as old as it used to now last year one of my best friends in the entire world attempted suicide shortly before her 27th birthday i'm eternally grateful that she's still alive today she's one of the most talented artists that i've ever known and the world needs writers like her to be alive now more than ever since that event i've been thinking a lot about the 27 club and the ways that we look at mental illness within the music community we're very eager to talk about the link between creativity and mental illness we look at kurt cobain nick drake brian wilson kanye west and so many more and we say maybe the demons that they fight are necessary for them to create their art some of these artists like brian wilson and kanye west have even said as much publicly i don't want to discount these people's experience but i think this is something that we exaggerate in our society and we do so to a lot of people's detriment mental illness and addiction are not necessary for greatness and the world is missing so much greatness because of mental illness and addiction when jimi hendrix overdosed on barbiturates and alcohol he had so much left to offer there was talk of hendrix collaborating with miles davis a team up that surely would have shook the musical landscape as we know it one of the last songs he developed before his death was machine gun an absolute triumph in his career and by the same measure one of the most iconic moments of kurt cobain's entire life the mtv unplugged set happened just a few months before his death in my own personal opinion i think nirvana's final album in utero might be their best work it shows so much promise for a next stage of nirvana that we never got to experience it's not just the 27 club either nick drake died at 26 two years after releasing his seminal work pink moon drake is often celebrated as a kind of prototypical tragic hero a tortured soul who used his trauma to create art that the world didn't appreciate until after he died but the reality of nick drake is more complicated than that drake's sister and his close friend robert kirby have both attested to the fact that drake was often a happy joyful person and it was in those moments of peace and joy that he was able to write and record his music mental illness is a traumatic experience and it's true trauma does often birth great art but i don't think that's something unique to mental illness david bowie's black star was written to process the trauma of a terminal cancer diagnosis much of john darnell's music was born out of his experiences with an abusive stepfather now i'm not saying that you need trauma to create great art either but art can be a way of working through that trauma and that's part of what i think happens with mental illness we see people using music to work through their own struggles and we start to believe that it's the illness not the artist creating the great work i don't believe that it's mental illness creating art that launches people to fame i believe that finding fame from your art can often lead to mental illness when you look at the circumstances around the deaths of the 27 club you can see a pattern emerging before his death jimi hendrix's mental health was deteriorating he was feeling paranoid and exhausted by the constant deluge of pressure from a press that was eager to label him as the new king of guitar this was compounded by the physical demands of an intensive touring schedule and the heavy partying lifestyle that inevitably seems to surround rock stars and kurt cobain's career was constantly plagued by media pressure he was only 24 years old when he was labeled the voice of his entire generation that kind of pressure can get to somebody and then of course there's the tragic story of amy winehouse by all accounts winehouse had no real desire to be famous she didn't want the weight and pressure that came with it but her distinct voice and singular talent turned her into an unwilling star for the entirety of weinhaus's short career she was hounded by british tabloids that were out for blood her struggles with addiction played out on a public stage as paparazzi followed her around constantly and tabloids were always ready with a comment on her appearance and weight at 25 years old winehouse expressed fears that she would soon be joining the 27 club and of course she did i can't truly speak to what was going on in amy winehouse or kurt cobain's head at the height of their success but i can't speak about my experiences through my work with polyphonic i've achieved the smallest fraction of fame but even that has been enough to wreak havoc on my mental health now let me be clear i am insanely fortunate i have an incredibly cool job and i am grateful every day for all of the people that have helped to make it happen but like any job being a public figure has its downsides there's the weight of expectation everybody wants me to espouse the ideals that they imagine i have everyone has a relationship with this shadow self this character of polyphonic that bears a passing resemblance to me but isn't me and then of course there's the comments i know that youtuber complaining about their comments section is a cliche and i'll probably lose some of my subscribers from this people who will say yeah suck it up people are mean on the internet but the reality is that these things stick with you ask anyone who has a public presence and they'll tell you that the praise can wash over but the smallest comments will work their way into the most insidious parts of your brain and needle at you keeping you awake tossing and turning for hours the suck it up mentality is exactly what leads to people like myself not acknowledging the impact that my work has on my mental health it leads to me believing that these aren't legitimate issues that these aren't things that i can talk about to the people i love and last year it led to me standing on the balcony of my ninth floor apartment staring down into the alley below i'm not saying this to complain because honestly i'd still take my job over pretty much anything else i'm saying this because i think that we need to have better conversations around mental health especially as an increasing number of us live our lives in the public sphere in the fall of 2018 i moved across the country and i lost a lot of my support systems in the process i worked long hours in a tiny windowless room and spent far too much time looking at what people said about me online it took its toll thoughts began to creep into my head and soon they became all-consuming i felt like i was spending every ounce of energy that i had just fighting them off i threw myself into my work and that only made things worse i didn't want to die not in the slightest but there was a part of my brain that was constantly nagging at me telling me that this was the best way out the only way out it wasn't i'm incredibly grateful that i'm surrounded by wonderful people that eventually helped pull me out of that place i'm doing a lot better now but my mental health is still far from what it once was i get anxiety attacks sometimes when i think about the people watching me and my work they got really bad this year but they're getting better i'm in the middle of a search for therapy and most days i feel pretty good in a weird way i got what my 16 year old self dreamed of sure i'm not a rock star but i do have hundreds of thousands of followers and i do struggle with a lot of the baggage that comes along with that it's not nearly as glamorous as i once thought i don't really know how to bring this video to a close i think that we as a society need to reframe our discussions around mental health and our discussions around celebrity we need to stop expecting so much from the artists that we love we need to let them be their own person and we need to stop glorifying whatever's going on in their head a lot of people have asked for a video on the 27 club here you go you haven't now i'm i'm sure a lot of you are gonna be disappointed by it but this is what i have to say now can we stop talking about the 27 club can we stop pretending that this is some special group of people touched by otherworldly experience let's instead remember that the 27 club are just a handful of the millions of people that have struggled with mental illness let's do what we can to support those who have mental illness whatever their age might be to create a world where we can talk about these things to create a world where we don't glorify these horrible experiences and let's fight to create a world where we don't need to lose so many great minds before their time i wasn't sure about having an ad on this video but i've decided it's going to afford me an opportunity to do my part so i'm going to donate a thousand dollars from the ad that you're about to watch to the brain and behavior research foundation a non-profit dedicated to helping us better understand and treat mental illness i often get people asking me advice on how to start their own youtube channel like mine now if you're gonna do this there's a lot of things to keep in mind but first and foremost you're gonna need to learn to use a video editing software personally my software of choice is the adobe creative suite in particular after effects so if you want to learn to do motion graphics like mine a great place to start is evan abrams introduction to adobe after effects on skillshare in five 20-minute lessons that course will teach you the fundamentals you need to get started on motion graphics and once you've done that skillshare has tons more courses that'll help you on your way to creating the videos you want to make or just to generally improving your life another important aspect of being a youtuber is developing a productivity system to keep yourself on track if you want help with that both thomas frank and ali abdull have skillshare courses that will teach you all that you need to know so head on over to the link in the description to check it out today the first thousand people to follow that link will get a free trial and after that is just 10 bucks a month skillshare is a great way to drive towards self-improvement and to try to reach your creative goals and following that link also really helps support my channel so thank you all so much for watching you

Channel: Polyphonic

Views: 358,235

Rating: 4.9464073 out of 5

Keywords: polyphonic, music, video essay

Id: 6AEWefmSTBM

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HexagonPenis]

I love polyphonic! This video was especially well made

[u/1ThinWhiteStardust]

This video gives you a different view on how we should treat the people in the 27 club

[u/Karl-Marx666]

Everything here is absolutely true