Why did Elliott Smith have to die? Why Lennon? Why Cobain?

[Taverner]

Why, the people who weave genius words and brilliant music together - why do THEY die?

[7wo7rees]

1. Music is a helluva drug.

[nomorenomore08]

2. Only the good die young...

[mokawanis]

3. Fuck if I know

but it sucks.

[vanlassie]

4. God Said No.

&feature=youtube_gdata_player

[Taverner]

5. God is dead

Please don't take offense

[vanlassie]

6. Oh. Good to know Do you like Dan Bern?

[Locut0s]

7. People often pay a high price for being born with above average intelligence and creativity.

The smartest and most creative are often tortured souls.

[nomorenomore08]

8. Don't I know it... Aspiring novelist/short-story writer here...

Can't make any claims of being a great artist, but I try.

[Taverner]

17. Hey - let's start a band...

I write music, I write shit lyrics

[nomorenomore08]

22. Yeah, no musical talent to speak of here.

But just out of curiosity, what style(s) do you play?

[In_The_Wind]

9. Why do any of us die.

[Phentex]

15. Because all we are is

dust in the wiiiiiiind!

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky!

[femmocrat]

10. They live hard and they die young.

And many of them engage in dangerous habits. But you already knew that.

[Art_from_Ark]

29. Well, John Lennon was shot

So it wasn't his hard living that did him in.

[femmocrat]

30. I know that. nt

[Sekhmets Daughter]

11. Perhaps, because they were not afraid to experience life

I think of John Lennon....

Or perhaps the opposite is true... Cobain & Smith, for example, may have feared life and tried to numb the experiences....

Why ask...there is neither rhyme nor reason to life.

[Myrina]

12. Mark Kozelek mentions them on "Among the Leaves"

His song "Track Number 8" is about the angst of being a songwriter and in it he mentions several of them.

[6000eliot]

14. I comfort myself with the idea that people like Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, and Judee Sill

died because they were just too good for this world.

[nomorenomore08]

23. Buckley is the one that really gets me.

Sill, I'm not very familiar with, and Drake was basically non-functioning the last couple years of his life, due to severe depression. But Buckley was a once-in-a-generation talent, as both a songwriter and a singer, and he was working on a follow-up to one of the best albums of the decade - and one of the best debuts ever - when he drowned in the Mississippi. One of the most senseless musical deaths I can think of.

[6000eliot]

28. I'm reading Dream Brother right now.

It alternates chapters on Jeff and his father Tim, who also died a senseless death at a young age. Drake made music of exquisite fragile beauty, as did Sill, who I compare with Brian Wilson for musical genius and William Blake for lyrical depth.

[nomorenomore08]

31. Yeah, his father's death really haunted him. Seems like it could've contributed to his own,

subconsciously. And I agree on Drake - I think 'Bryter Layter' especially is a stunning album - although his stuff is, maybe not too intense, but too something for me to want to listen to it very frequently. I guess more than anything it's just incredibly sad music, not so obviously depressive in an Ian Curtis or Michael Gira sort of way, but more the expression of a poetic, lonely soul. Someone who feels intimately tied to nature and to the place he's from, yet also distant - in an almost alien way - from everything and everyone.

And I guess I need to check out Judee Sill, since you've given her very high praise indeed.

[Iggo]

16. We're human.

It's what we do.

[KamaAina]

18. Janis. Jim Morrison. Biggie. Tupac.

Amy Winehouse. Pigpen from the Dead. And so on...

You know they've got a hell of a band...

[Taverner]

19. Loved that Stephen King story!

[Arugula Latte]

20. And Scott Stapp lives on ...

[Taverner]

21. Yes...

[nomorenomore08]

24. To paraphrase Bill Hicks/Denis Leary, Stevie Ray Vaughan's dead and we can't get Jon Bon Jovi

on a fuckin' helicopter???

[warrprayer]

25. ...

[kwassa]

26. Why am I going to die? Why am I not immortal?

I would settle for being a demi-god.

[harmonicon]

27. Well, bullets/whatever's in a shotgun shell aren't conducive to being in the human body.

The body naturally reacts by dying.