It’s hard to imagine grunge music without singer-songwriter Mark Lanegan. But it wasn’t about labels for him: just about music that helps you through life.
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Stuttgart – One moves through life somewhere between the no-future resentment of the angry pessimists and the greed for the first million before the thirtieth birthday. Sometimes music helps to find the course. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the soundtrack of a frightened generation was assembling in Seattle. That music was soon called grunge, which stated that the situation was pretty bad, that it would soon get even worse, but that there might be a chance to let the worst wash over you: if you formed yourself into a little hard ball, maybe with good buddies or in bed next to a loved one.
One of the singer-songwriters who shaped grunge was Mark Lanegan, who has died at the age of 57 – and the fact that his name is far less well known than Kurt Cobain reveals something about the mechanics of the media and the music industry, but little about the musicians themselves.
homeless and addicted
Lanegan sang with the Screaming Trees, then the Queens of the Stone Age, he’s released solo albums – but none of it followed a career plan, none of it squinted at trends. Lanegan made music because, to him, it was life itself – or perhaps one should say, the lifeline in a life-or-death struggle. Lanegan was addicted to heroin for a long time, a drunkard to boot, his livelihood hung in tatters, at times he was homeless. He talked about it in his memoirs “Sing backwards and weep”, which in German means “All the darkness of this world”. Above all, however, he depicted the struggle between the will to live and depression in his fascinatingly ambiguous songs, which map moods rather than formulate clear thoughts.
months in the intensive care unit
“Either a song pulls me out of myself,” Lanegan told our newspaper in 2015, “or it takes me to a place where I’m suddenly watching my own movie. Songs that I can identify with sometimes also have the effect that I suddenly see myself in a way that I would like to see myself in.” That’s how the man with the scratchy but very flexible baritone voice eluded labels , he was also uncomfortable with grunge: whether it was blues, hard rock, punk or garage rock – what was important to him was whether something moved, not whether it followed a pattern.
As soon as his memoirs were published, he pushed a second volume: “Devil in a Coma”. In prose, poems and song lyrics, he describes his particularly difficult course of Covid 19, the tormenting months in the intensive care unit. It is a book of admonition and remorse, because Mark Lanegan had previously been one of those confused pandemic deniers for whom conspiracy rumors seemed more credible than emergency medicine doctors and virologists. The Irish migrant announced in January 2022 that he would “be the first to get a booster shot” as soon as the boosters were available. He died at his home in Killarney on February 22nd, the cause of death was not given for the time being.
Mark Lanegan mit den Screaming Trees: Nearly lost you
Mark Lanegan mit den Queens of the Stone Age: Song for the Dead
Mark Lanegan: One Way Street
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