The Tarantino Effect

November 14, 2020December 7, 2020 RilalyLeave a comment

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most successful director of violent movies in the last 30 years. Men, in particular, love his brand of violence. Why were/are Tarantino movies so successful? My best guess is that, with Pulp Fiction in particular, he made violence fun and funny. Beyond the influential dialogue, the style, the great music, and the evocative colors, Pulp Fiction was a modern combination of the most violent Scorsese movies ever made and the humorous exchanges of Abbot and Costello. Another element we love about Pulp Fiction, and the other Tarantino movies to a lesser degree, is the introduction of all of these alternative codes his characters develop to assuage the guilt they might otherwise feel by engaging in such a lifestyle.

No characters refer to codes explicitly, of course, but the philosophical conversations the Samuel Jackson and John Travolta characters have, combined with the manner in which they conduct business suggests it’s not personal. It’s just business. There’s also a hint of the other mafia movie standbys, “Everyone knows what they’re getting into when they enter into this business,” and the, “Kill or be killed” motif.

In a slight twist on the conversation of codes, the Uma Thurman character mocks the extent of this code saying, “You think Marcellus Wallace would throw another person out of a window over a foot massage?” The import of this joke is that we all think, thanks to Travolta’s misunderstanding, that a foot massage is such a sensual act that it warrants violent retribution. The Uma Thurman chunk of dialogue admonishes us all for believing that these characters are so savage that they would seek to maim and kill people for whatever reason they can think up. She alludes to the fact that a foot massage might warrant a behind the scenes scolding, but what Travolta’s suggesting is crazy. She helps the audience understand that while their world does not involve the codes the rest of us live by, they’re not that outrageously violent.

In another scene, the John Travolta character states that he respects these codes, and the hierarchy of their world, but he would prefer that those who order him to do things do so in a more courteous manner. “A please would be nice.” Thus, the Travolta character informs us that he has a code within the code.

In another scene, pertinent to this topic, Travolta defines his personal code in a conversation about someone keying his car. He says he wishes he would’ve caught them doing it, “It’d been worth him doing it, just so I could’ve caught him.” The Travolta character and the Eric Stoltz character agree that keying a car is an egregious violation of their shared code. Murdering a man is just business, but keying a car is a “They should be killed. No trial, no jury, straight to execution” personal violation of the code. We all speak in such ways, in jest, and perhaps that’s all the Stolz character was doing, but we suspect that Travolta is not joking in the same manner. The whole movie, Pulp Fiction, is all about codes. The characters don’t follow the codes the rest of us live by, but they have an insular code, a code among thieves, that they all live by to establish some sort of order within their otherwise immoral, soul-less, and piece-of-junk universe.

Tarantino did not develop this brand of comedy, and he didn’t invent the idea of an alternative code that criminals develop to assuage their guilt over murdering and robbing people, but he did it in a different, and some say better, way than most screenwriters and directors.

Most men dream of living by such codes, and we think we would might compete pretty well. If everyone agreed that we should settle zoning laws on lawn area disputes with a large pistol, we think everyone would behave a little better. We would love to pull a hand cannon out on someone, repeat some cool biblical verse, and blow someone away without flinching. We also think, on some level, that we could do it without much guilt, as long as the participants all knew what they were getting into when they entered our world. Would we have any guilt if we ran into our victim’s mother, father, or kids? No, because they all knew the life he led, and if they didn’t, that’s kind of on the deceased for not informing them better.

“It’s not personal, it’s business,” we tell our wives in the movie theater after they question us for laughing at such violent scenes. Their lines and actions make sense to us in those 90 minutes. “That guy wouldn’t pay. The guy had something they wanted, and he wouldn’t give it up willingly. They had to kill the guy. They had to send a message. You understand that right?”

We’ve all accepted this “It’s not personal, it’s business” rationale for so long, dating back to The Godfather, that it now makes sense to us. I don’t care if you’re running a drug cartel, a prostitution ring, or whatever, is killing members of the competition the best way to run a business? Yet, few would attend a movie that contained a line from the leader of the business saying, “We really need to talk to Chris in accounting to see if we can improve on our distribution costs in the Northeast, and if you could drop a line to Steve in the Midwest. I really think he can improve his team’s Quality Assurance scores by laying off the bottom 10%.” That’s business. That’s boring. Have the managers in charge of Apple Music ever considered “taking out” some of the most talented minds at Spotify? We’ve seen that business plan work a million times, in the movies, and we know it works. No one goes to jail, and no one feels the least bit bad about it either. “The programmers at Spotify knew what they were getting into when they signed on for this. It’s just business.”

“It’s all fiction,” we tell our girlfriends who put a hand over their face when three guys stab another guy in a trunk after that guy disrespected one of the Goodfellas in a bar. The scene made perfect sense to us in the 90 minute, alternative code mentality, and we knew that guy was in trouble when he wouldn’t shut up. If he had any sense, he would’ve known better than to disrespect Joe Pesci in front of his friends. The guy should’ve known when he signed on to do this movie that if he was going to disrespect Joe Pesci, in a Martin Scorsese movie, that he would suffer some kind of grizzly death. The Joe Pesci character gave this man several opportunities to shut up, and he wouldn’t. I’m not sure how that trunk stabbing applied to their business in anyway, but it was funny when Pesci cracked at joke about it at his mother’s house.

Our girlfriend laughed at that joke too, and we now know she gets it. She’s along for the ride. She’s adapted her moral code to the alternative code of the movie. We can’t understand why it took her so long to understand this is just fantasy and fiction. It’s not her idea of fantasy, but she’ll put that aside long enough to try to enjoy the movie.

***

I have a dream scene for Tarantino. A bank robbery occurs, off screen, as it did in Reservoir Dogs. After this robbery is complete, the boss who dreamed up this robbery, divvies up the proceeds of that robbery to all the players of this robbery in scenes that occur off screen. The only divvying up we see occurs with one particular recipient. Once this recipient receives his share, a twist happens. The boss turns on the recipient of those proceeds.

“What are you doing?” the recipient pleads with his hands up.

“I’m robbing you,” the gun-toting boss says. The audience might consider this a violation of the code, until the boss adds, “I paid you your fair share, and now I’m robbing you.”

This particular scene might involve a philosophical Abbot and Costello-style exchange that elucidates the alternative moral code of both characters. The unspoken lynchpin of the scene is if we’re going to consider the boss turning on the recipient a violation of the code, then we must consider robbery a violation of code, because the only reason the two of them have any money to divide is a robbery.

Prior to this scene, the director also strategically portrays them as equally sympathetic to the point that we’re cheering on both characters when this scene occurs. We’ve also received ample evidence of the moral ambiguity of both characters involved, and we’ve accepted the codes they’ve established. They’re both living by the code to a point that we don’t know who to cheer on in this scene. They’re both bad guys, and in their own morally ambiguous ways, good guys.

What the boss is doing is wrong in a purely philosophical manner. It is also a violation of the social contract between the two men, but in the context of the arbitrary, fictional movie of alternative moral codes, is it still a violation of the code? The main guy fulfilled his obligation as boss by paying the recipient, and once the money touched the recipient’s hand, he technically fulfilled their social contract, so he’s not a welcher. Once that was complete, he robbed the recipient, and if we’re going to consider robbery immoral, it undercuts the premise of the movie that robbery, violence, and murder are just the way some men choose to make a living.

“Yeah, but the recipient earned his cut.”

Even those of us who enjoy setting our own moral codes aside for 90 minutes aren’t going to go so far out that we think the recipient earned the money he received. He stuck a gun in a teller’s face, and he stole the money others earned. We think about all the miserable hours of labor those who deposited their money in that bank endured to put a little nest egg in that bank. The reply to this is, “They robbed a bank, and most banks are federally insured, and everyone who earned the money they put in the bank was federally insured too.” Okay, but neither the recipient nor the boss earned that money. Both men endured equal levels of risking their freedom to attain it, but they didn’t earn it.

As this scene plays out, the audience learns, through the recipient, that life is not fair, and the life he has chosen is even less fair. The business he chose also involves players who never learned how to share. The internal codes of conduct are in place to self-regulate, but what does the recipient do if a boss arguably violates one of them? The recipient cannot go to an arbitration board to air their grievances, and they cannot go to law enforcement. The boss is also a valuable conduit for the recipient to future jobs, and if the recipient wants more jobs, then he has to abide by the boss’ wishes, but who’s to say that the boss won’t rob him again after future jobs?

The recipient has three choices. He can give the money willingly, as he sees no other option, but doing so, could lead others to perceive him as weak. If he chooses that route, he might as well get out of the business, because everyone who hears about this will rob him after the fact, going forward. He can attempt to talk his way out of it, but we all know that doesn’t work in such settings. His only recourse is to refuse to give the main guy the money and pull his own gun. The main guy shoots the recipient before he can get that gun out. This tweaks our moral code slightly, until the boss says, “Sorry buddy, it’s just business” to the dying man. That line puts him back in the moral code, for it is entirely consistent with the code they’ve established throughout the movie.

We’ll probably never see such a scene added to a movie of this type, because it would lift the veil on this whole world of moral ambiguity by suggesting the only reason the piece-of-junk boss is robbing the piece-of-junk recipient is for more money, and no self-respecting director would allow their audience to think the only reason their characters want to rob is for the money. Such a scene might also undermine the motif the director/screenwriter’s portrayal that these characters are just as a bunch of good guys who just happen to steal. The scene might lead the audience to believe that they cheat their brothers in crime too, and they lie to them. The audience might also believe that thieves are bullies who attempt to dominate their weaker peers for more money, and that doesn’t serve the integrity of the characters or the appeal of the movie well.

“If you’ve ever been in jail, you know that most of the people who succeed in that environment would not succeed anywhere else,” someone once said. “It’s a bizarro world where up is down and down is up. A piece of junk is heralded for his ability to tap into his most primal, most ruthless nature, and an otherwise successful man, who has spent his life improving on all of his otherwise negative instincts is scorned for being … a pansy, less male, or whatever.”

What would it take to succeed in the climate created at Apple, PayPal, or Spotify? The question the audience is suppose to ask is, is it really that different? The motif that quality directors, like Tarantino and Scorsese lay, is that he who believes in the “honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work” is a schmuck, and the thieves who rot in jail are schmucks too. Their players exist somewhere in the middle of that and everything else the audience considers a truth of life.

Thus, when they lie, cheat, and steal to gain comfort in life, as opposed to money of course, we’re to assume this happens as often in corporate America, except they’re more boorish in their desire for money. As someone who has never been to jail, and who’s only experience with the culture therein is, admittedly, limited to that which is depicted in reality TV, it appears to be so much more primal. I know this is obvious to everyone but the “Is it really that different?” crowd, but an unstable person prone to displays wild emotional outbursts doesn’t last long in corporate America, but in jail he or she becomes a pod boss for exhibiting such characteristics. An inmate who belittles the weak for the purpose of dominating them doesn’t fare well in corporate America, no matter what you’ve heard, but for a person who wants to be considered a pod boss, it’s all but listed as a bullet point in the job requirements. Thus, to succeed in the jail, we need to channel our worst, most primal characteristics if we hope to succeed. In corporate America, this analogy suggests, we need to exhibit our finest characteristics, but to succeed in the fictional worlds depicted in Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction, we need to find a schmuck-less middle ground.

Anyone who reads this might suspect that the author is subject to flights of moral relativism. I can assure you, without stepping onto a soapbox, that that is not the case. I suspend whatever I think of such alternative universes in the same manner I will when listening to music or watching cartoons. When I watch a gangster-related movie, I suspend reality in the same manner I do when I watch horror movies. I don’t believe in any of the supernatural beings that torment our main characters, but if I’m not willing to put my rational mind aside for long enough to enjoy a movie that violates everything I believe I probably shouldn’t be clicking play. If the moral fiber of our personal constitution is strong enough, we should be able to weather minimal assaults we experience in cartoons, horror movies, music, what have you. There are serious venues that challenge our modes of thought, and I think everyone should read them for the cerebral, philosophical challenges they present, but anyone who has their beliefs system seriously challenged by these otherwise unserious, artistic vehicles should probably spend more time reading.

Smashing Pumpkins’ Cyr Will not be Mellon Collie

November 10, 2020June 12, 2021 RilalyLeave a comment

“It’s not Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness,” will be the theme of the critical reaction to the new Smashing Pumpkins new album Cyr. The songs we’ve heard from this upcoming album thus far aren’t too bad, but they’re not Mellon Collie. At this date, some 25 years since its release (!), Billy Corgan probably has a love/hate relationship with the album called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. We can guess that he loves the fact that he created what many call a masterpiece, for not many artists do, but he probably hates that everything he created lives in its shadow.

We all have varying tastes, of course, and some might say they prefer one of the other Smashing Pumpkins’ albums, but even they would admit Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream had special, timeless, and transcendental qualities about them that are difficult to recapture. Some of us call them masterpieces in their own right, and others say they are the products of Billy Corgan’s creative peak.

What is a creative peak? It is as difficult for artists to create, as it is to maintain. It is equally as difficult for the rest of us to explain. We can say that our reaction to it was a time and place phenomenon, and we could say that Billy Corgan’s creation of it had something to do with this phenomenon too. The finished products, coupled with the worldwide reaction to them might have satisfied Corgan’s need to prove himself, and he’s never been able to duplicate that inner drive. Those of us who have never accomplished such feats don’t know how hard it must be to recapture the elements that drove Corgan to create these albums. I don’t intend that to be a commentary on Billy Corgan’s work that followed, for I think most of his work post-Mellon Collie has been better than the vast majority of his peers, but he set such a high bar for himself with Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie. Every artist goes through peaks and valleys, and most of them cannot explain them. We can’t explain them either, as I wrote, we couldn’t explain why we prefer some art to others, but we know it when we see/hear it, especially in hindsight.

When creative peaks prove as fruitful as Corgan’s was, most of us laymen just assume that they will last forever, and when they don’t, we express our disappointment by saying, “It’s a good album, but it’s not as good as their masterpiece. It’s almost like they’re not trying anymore.” Everyone assumes that Kurt Cobain would’ve just gone on, had he lived, writing top-notch albums, but as Cobain wrote, “Teenage angst has paid off well. Now I’m bored and old.” It was almost as if he was preparing us for what was going to follow, if he lived of course.

If we lump Siamese Dream in with Mellon Collie, and we add Aeroplane Flies High and Pisces Iscariot into the mix, I think we can say that Billy Corgan had an enviable five-year run. Some of the songs on those latter two productions were definitely B-sides, but if we removed some of the top-notch songs on Aeroplane, we might be able to put together two high quality albums. We diehard fans have done so on blank cassette tapes and MP3 playlists. It just seems unfair to compare everything he’s done since, and everything he will do in the future to that creative peak, but such is the nature of art.

Billy Corgan and Co. were a songwriting machine from roughly 1993 to 1996. It was an incredibly creative period for Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlain, and James Iha. (I’m sure Chamberlain, Iha, and D’arcy had more creative input than reports suggest, but from what I’ve read Corgan was the maestro/dictator in the studio.) Personally, I loved the album Gish, and I devoured that album before Siamese Dream’s release, but I wouldn’t put on the same shelf as Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream. I realize that some of the material on the boxset likely predates Siamese Dream, so let’s be generous in our estimate and say this creative period stretched out over a five year, incredibly prolific creative peak. How many musicians would give whatever remains of their otherwise damaged livers for 1/5^th of the creative output the Smashing Pumpkins had in those five years? Personally, I think it was one of the most prolific periods of music for one artist in rock history, but I think it’s fair to say that the high bar Corgan set during this period ended twenty-five years ago.

I remember when the Smashing Pumpkins released the single Ava Adore. Oh boy,we thought, here we go again. The leap wasn’t as great as the one between Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie for some of us, but we all fantasized that the single was a sign that this peak would last far longer than we thought it would after the Pumpkins released a double album of material followed by a boxset. Siamese Dream was, after all, the opposite of a sophomore jinx. Once Siamese Dream hit our tape deck, it rendered Gish obsolete, and any flirtation we had with the idea that there might be a junior jinx ended the moment we heard the single Bullet with Butterfly Wings. So, when the single Ava Adore came out, it seemed feasible that Corgan was simply a hard rock/pop prodigy who would blow us out of the water every two to three years until the end of his life.

How could one man, and his band, release so much material in such a small amount of time, and come up with yet another great album? The answer was he couldn’t. The peak was over. I still think that if Corgan saved about eight of the best songs on Aeroplane Flies High, and combined them with the six best songs on Ava Adore, I think he could’ve satisfied critics and fans so much that they would’ve listed Ava Adore as his third best album and part of the creative peak. What motivated Corgan to release the boxset, I suspect, was that he wanted to put Mellon Collie, and everything attached to it, behind him. I think he wanted to defeat the idea of a creative peak in his own mind and challenge himself with a restart.

***

When critics savaged R.E.M.’s first effort without Bill Berry, 1998’s Up, Michael Stipe complained that he thought Up was a great album. He said that critics unfairly compared Up to their previous five albums, i.e. their creative peak. He said something along the lines of, “If an up and coming band created Up, you critics would be salivating all over it, but because it wasn’t Automatic for the People, Monster, or New Adventures in Hi-Fi, you think the album stinks.” Perhaps Stipe and Co. were frustrated that the high bar they set for themselves that couldn’t be maintained forever, or that they felt like the critics helped cut that peak short prematurely. It’s also possible that the departure of Bill Berry was more profound than anyone imagined. Whatever the case was for them, the critics were right, as Up proved the creative peak was over for R.E.M. They would release four more albums and except for a few singles here and there, those albums only provided further evidence that peaks end for every creative artist.

Stipe’s greater question is worthy of exploration however. How would we regard albums like Ava Adore or Machina, if they came out before Mellon Collie or Siamese Dream? It’s impossible to answer of course, but it’s an interesting question.

Artists can artificially attempt to realign the stars back to the configuration they experienced during their peak. They can bring back ex-members, hire the producer who helped finesse their masterpiece, and they can go back to the basics, after expunging their need to experiment. They can eat nothing but bacon and drink nothing but the flavor of Snapple they drank when they created their masterpiece, but something will forever elude them.

Our immediate reaction to a new Smashing Pumpkins album now is, they just lost it, whatever it is. They can write some great singles here and there, but as far as writing awe-inspiring magic that drove them to create deep cuts and B-sides that are better than most bands’ hit singles, those days are over. The greater question I would ask is, “Did they ever have it?” The answer to that question, to my mind, is an undeniable, “YES! Yes, they did. For five years, Billy Corgan and Co. created some of the most beautiful, most aggressive, and most pleasing music some of us have ever heard.” For all of the comparatively greater praise devoted to bands such as Guns N’ Roses, Metallica and Nirvana, they only had two influential, transcedental albums. As great as Mr. Bungle and Soundgarden were, they only came out with two fantastic albums. How many great bands came out with songs that blew our minds, but they failed to follow those great songs up with enough deep cuts to make a great album? It’s debatable, but I would suggest that great singles blind most people to the fact that most of the albums they were on weren’t as great as we thought they were.

In some ways, legends like The Beatles, Queen, David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin spoiled us by setting such an unreasonable standard for the rest of the bands in music by having more than two great albums. For those who are lucky enough to have more than one great album, they should go on to make the best music they can, but they should know that they will probably never be able to recapture that ‘time and place’ magic that usually only happens once in a lifetime. If it happens twice, live it and love it for as long as it lasts, for it will probably never happen again. This note also goes out to all critics, fans, and everyone in between who judge decent to good albums on the basis that they’re not as great as the albums these artists produced during their peak. How many of our favorite artists never made one great album, top to bottom?

As one reviewer on Allmusic.com wrote, “You can’t blame Billy [Corgan], he already did his best.” This reviewer reminds me of other non-creative types who have never created one piece of art. The implicit suggestion some make is that once a creative peak ends the artist should just quit. They should just ride off into the sunset, collect their royalty checks and consider their life a life well lived. They do the same with athletes. They suggest that after a professional athlete wins a championship that he should just retire. They proved that they did the best they could with their talent, and we all know that it’s downhill from here, so we want them to quit so we can live with a fond memory of them. What we forget when we make such self-serving requests is how hard it is to accomplish great artistic and athletic feats. They require massive amounts of practice, time spent doing this while their friends did something else, and a level of commitment and passion that critics and fans will never understand. That passion doesn’t just end even if they come to terms with the idea that they’ve peaked. The passion is their reason for being, and we don’t have to pay tickets to see them do it, but to call for them to end their career is self-serving. I think the passion and love that drove Bill Cogran to create the masterpieces Mellon Collie and Siamese Dream is obvious in the beautiful music he’s created since, even if what he captured during that five-year peak isn’t.

Unrealized Gains in the Music of the 90’s

August 9, 2020March 17, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Whenever a gifted artist dies, there’s always a sense that they’re irreplaceable, but there’s something different about music. There’s something special, cathartic, and spiritual about the music that uniquely gifted creative artists offer to bind us all. We can’t explain our connection to these artists, but we enjoy the beauty and craftsmanship of their art so much that when they die, we feel a sense of loss that’s almost painful. Most of us never met the artist, yet in a strange, inexplicable way, we feel we know them. Losing an ingenious comedian might be the only comparable loss, as they offer us the precious commodity of laughter. An ingenious musician might offer everything but laughter, but when they die, some unusual, inexplicable part of us dies with them. The connection is so strong and heartfelt that, in some cases, their death almost feels like the death of a family member.

Who’s your favorite musician? Are all of your favorite musicians from a certain era? Some of us go retro, some of us try to stay hip to music’s latest styles and trends, but most of us remain true to the era of music we listened to in our formative years, usually between the high school years and college years. My friends and I love music from every era, but our sweet spot occurred somewhere between ’86 and ‘99.

We all know the artists from the 60’s inspired the artists of the 70’s to try to do something somewhat similar but different and better, and the 70’s artists inspired the 80’s, and so on. Did the 70’s stable of hard rock artists do it better than the 80’s or the 90’s? It depends on whom you ask. Yet, if we were to hand out grades for the various eras hard rock, we might have to give the 60’s a (‘C’) based on the idea that most of the artists of the era focused on pop, and we might give the 70’s an (‘A’) and the 80’s a (‘B’). Due to the unrealized gains in the 90’s, however, we would have to give that decade an (‘I’) grade, as in incomplete.

Most general debates about the greatest music in rock n’ roll focus on the 60’s and the 70’s. Yet, even with the sense that the 90’s were incomplete, it was such an insanely creative period for underground and established artists that some of us consider it the most underrated era in music. We could provide a list of the incredibly diverse and creative albums produced in this era, but few would argue that it was one of the most free, most wide-ranging eras in music history. When we dig beneath the surface, and we account for the unrealized gains from this period, in a hypothetical contest with other eras, the idea that 90’s was the greatest era in rock could’ve been a fact as opposed to one man’s opinion.

Unrealized gains is a tool investors use to determine what their profit might be if they sold a stock they own today. That profit is not realized, in other words, until they sell the stock. I realize I am taking some literary license when I use this term to define how much greater the 90’s could’ve been, but if we are going to compare these eras, in an artistic sense, a tweaked definition of this term unrealized gains illustrates this thesis that the era could’ve been so much greater if so many of its young, talented artists didn’t die, and they realized their full potential.

There are a number of artists we could list in this space whose lives were cut short in the 90’s, but there are three in particular who some believe could’ve changed the landscape of music had they survived. Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain, and Jeff Buckley were three very different artists, but when we take the creative output they achieved, and we speculate about the potential they had to create more diverse and creative songs, we arrive at substantial unrealized gains for music and the culture during this era.

Based upon the frequency with which these artists completed production on their albums in that era, usually biannually, I figure that the three of them, combined, could’ve probably released ten more albums before the close of the 90’s, and this does not account for any side projects, or solo projects, they might have pursued. How many of those ten albums would’ve been classics, and how many of them would’ve helped redefine that era and beyond? We can only imagine, unfortunately, that these artists would’ve grown bored in their genre and would’ve explored other genres and enriched us all with their creativity in so many fields of music. We can also speculate that those ten albums would’ve spawned a greater algorithm of other artists taking their influence and trying to do something different and better with it before the end of the 90’s.

The one asterisk we must account for in this equation is that it’s possible that these three artists would’ve never made another decent album again. They may have gone solo, as all but Buckley were members of groups at the time of their demise, and they might have quit the music industry altogether, but that proposition seems improbable. They might have been nothing more than products of a system that helped them create, finesse, and complete these albums. They might not have been as creative and ingenious as we assume. They might have owed their creative output to more to other people than we’ll ever know. Their music might’ve relied on a uniquely gifted producer, a quality mixer, or a specific band member who propelled their creative output. Losing those people could’ve exposed these artists as nothing more team players, as opposed to uniquely gifted creative artists in their own right. Whatever the case is, they might not have been as talented as we assume. We can only comment on what we know, and we don’t think anyone can listen to a collection of the best material from these three artists without thinking about how much more they had to offer. All three of them were in their 20’s when they made some of their best earth-shattering songs, and they all had, at the very least, ten more years of quality songwriting ahead of them.

Andrew Wood might be the most tragic, as he died of a heroin overdose in 1990, at age 24, shortly before his band Mother Love Bone would release their first album Apple. Kurt Cobain died at 27 years of age, in 1994, and Buckley died in 1997 at age 30, but I don’t think anyone would argue that Cobain and Buckley achieved a greater narrative arc than Andrew Wood did.

Some suggest that Cobain’s group Nirvana was so groundbreaking that it killed the brand of arena rock called heavy metal, but others might argue that the death of the charismatic and creative Andrew Wood was another contributing factor to its demise. If he survived his overdose and decided to go clean, Wood might’ve kept heavy metal on life support with his creative and inventive flourishes.

The 90’s also involved the death of Shannon Hood, lead singer of Blind Melon in ’95 at 28 years-old, and the death of Sublime’s lead singer Bradley Nowell, in 1996 death at 28 years-old. We could also include Layne Staley on this list, but he died of an overdose in ’02, at 34 years-old, and the 90’s saw a great deal of his creative output fully realized. When comparing the various eras, however, the idea that the 90’s could’ve been so much richer with the potential creative output these incredibly artistic artists could’ve and should’ve produced is an almost painful thought.

We have a love/hate relationship with the idea of comparisons. Most people would caution us against comparing any artists, particularly when those comparisons involve icons. “Comparisons often have no basis, and they usually anger more than they intrigue,” some say. “My advice is to avoid doing them.” In the spirit of throwing caution to the wind, let’s get nuts. Andrew Wood wrote silly love songs, as Paul McCartney did. Kurt Cobain wrote social songs that appealed to young people on such a profound level that some call him a voice of his generation, as they did with John Lennon and Bob Dylan in the 60’s. Jeff Buckley wrote beautiful, soulful melodies that appealed to our spiritual side in the manner George Harrison did. The point in bringing these comparisons up is not to suggest that these artists could’ve been as talented as those icons, but to suggest that we cannot talk about the 60’s without mentioning Harrison, McCartney, Lennon, and Dylan. Leaving them out would not only be foolish, it would feel incomplete. Those of us who love the 90’s feel it’s almost as unfair to compare the 90’s to other generations without considering the potential of what it could’ve produced and the prospect of its unrealized gains in the vein of those artists who died during the era, with special consideration devoted to the prospect of what Wood, Cobain and Buckley could’ve produced.