Early: A Meditation on Great Artists Who Are Gone
David Foster Wallace. We’ll never get a new Nirvana song. We will continue to get new Juice WRLD music because he was so much more prolific than Nirvana.
But we will always have MTV Unplugged in New York like we have Juice’s 45-minute-long freestyle on his radio appearance on YouTube.
Kurt and Juice WRLD. Two similarly early endings. Similarly beautiful souls, generous geniuses with doom in their fate. Or was it destruction in their way? Juice took his own life by taking more pills than he ever had in his days. He thought he had no limit by gradually or abruptly (how can I know) increasing his dosage and previously living through it. When federal agents were seeking to send him to prison for the rest of his life by locating and seizing the collection of illegal drugs that Juice had on him, he took a lethal dose of Percocet mixed with Lean (or promethazine and codeine cough syrup mixed with soda). He got rid of his stash by swallowing it. It sent him into cardiac arrest. No one helped him because the agents present were DEA agents, not emergency medical services. Juice, the legend we cherish for his genius, his endless talent, and his dearly humble, magnanimous energy, lay there dying without help because everybody present was under arrest or placing people under arrest. Little care was paid to the fact that the most talented hip-hop artist living was nearing death while he struggled to keep his heart pumping. He was left to die. And he did die.
Kurt Cobain put a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Endless genius, and yes, an artist before my time, but who significantly contributed to designing the culture at the time I was born. David Foster Wallace and Kurt Cobain designed the culture that raised me. The culture shifters were given little attention in my household. It was soft rock, Eminem, and Hugh Grant lighting up Mom’s and Dad’s living rooms.
XXXTentacion, shot in his BMW i8 after purchasing jewelry and without security, was a brilliant gift of a human. These things happened in my lifetime, yet they only gain significance in hindsight. History-making events rarely catch my attention as they are occurring because I’m more interested in cultivating original thought and learning from the past, so much so that it is excessive to appreciate the thrusters and dusters, the ebb and flow initiators, the touchstones of the culture in which I live.
Right now, the culture is dominated by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, the cabinet of the Trump administration, and perpetuated by cruel billionaires and ignorant and tasteless supporters.
But this is about music.
XXXTentacion was a culture definer of a caliber of genius heretofore unseen. Kurt Cobain was a world impactor. So was David Foster Wallace, and so was Juice WRLD. They are all dead, and three at their own hands. I discovered the material of the carpet on which I was born only in adulthood. Which is to say, I only comprehend the fabric of the universe of 28 years prior because I now have a fully developed frontal cortex.
And still I learn. We still have Kendrick. We have Tyler, the Creator, and we have… the memory of the greats who are gone. May they rock in peace and rest deep. We still have Mike White, we have Ari Aster, and we have the albums of Nirvana and the printed copies of Infinite Jest and all of Wallace’s nonfiction writings.
We have each other. We have our friends. Perhaps it should be more obvious than it is to me that having our friends ought to be primary, but I always gave more energy to deceased legends who contributed such classic art in their lifetimes than to the people who grew up with me in San Jose in the south of Silicon Valley.
We all design culture. We have the nearest proximity to influence than anyone has ever had through the arts, techniques, personalities, and content that come with social media. We have never been closer to true influence. But not everybody can be an influencer.
We have our families. We have our pals. We have our bros. We have our sisters. Our moon. Our sun. Our awareness that what is obvious to me won’t be obvious to you. A love for each other. An abundant kindness that is left unspoken, as Emerson put it, and lessons learned from mistakes.
Death is truer than anything in life, but we have the enormous power of choice in life and only in life. Death is the most definitive quality humanity has in common, but that doesn’t mean to claim it by one’s own choosing is a benevolent act. When others say that you took your own life early, it means they loved you enough to want to see more of you in the future. Death is wise yet taking one’s life is rarely a choice informed by agency. Usually, one is possessed by the Sadness they cannot shake or lose, the Emptiness whose bellowing echoes over their triumphs. They are led to the gun, or to the rope, by an impregnable darkness within.
There is more wisdom in death than there is in life, but only in life can wisdom, or anything, be shared. Only in life can we share. There is no physical communion in death. Death is not a cartoon. If it is the most overpowering denominator that humans have in common, it is quiet and intense in its power. But life is a revolutionary dance opposed to the dark wisdom of that ultimate Stillness. Through communication we may thrive. We connect, therefore we are. We listen and we advance ourselves by the grace and soul of the benevolent other. We share in life, and because Kurt, Juice, David, and X were generous and pure artistic souls during their times, we have so many of their enduring acts of life, which design our collective identity still. May their energy that still persists in the Earth of the living come unnamed and gracious upon our senses. May the wheel that feeds from death back into life and their role in it bring our spirits to new heights. Here’s to appreciating the greats, choosing life, and finding a living Stillness, an acceptance of the true wisdom that may be had in life. We connect, therefore we are. May we articulate our love with unending finesse.
