by Alex Samson

Created on: February 09, 2009

To err is human . . . I forget who said that, but it's not really important to the crux of this argument. The fact that we as a society insist on placing our heroes on increasingly high pedestals just so that we can pull them down and kick mud in their faces is.

Why do we do that? Why do we find it so hard to remember and appreciate that rock stars are human too, and as such are susceptible to the same deficiencies and weaknesses as the rest of us?

Another enlightened writer or philosopher once remarked that a writer of fiction needed to know and understand sorrow and misery, while a writer of poetry should embrace the grief and pain of loss. Given that many rock stars routinely pour their hearts out to the thrash and clang of electric guitars, perhaps we should perceive some similarities between modern rock icons and poets of yesteryear.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. Here is a man who is regarded as one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century. A self-confessed and widely documented user of opiates. If not for substance abuse would we the literary world ever have got to enjoy Kubla Khan or the Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Alexander Pope is another celebrated poet, but he too was a drug user and serial womanizer. John Clare: destitute and lived in mental hospitals for much of his life and yet is still revered as one of the finest pastoral poets ever to walk the meadows of Britain.

Wind forward to modern times and we see influencial musicians producing some of the defining sounds of several generations going through their own pains and anx. Hendrix, Cobain, Rose, Dillon even Sinatra (who I know isn't rock, but stills bears out the argument). Every one of these artists had and still has (those that are still with us) their own blend of problems. Would they have produced the same material if life had been a cake walk? I doubt it. Where would the roar anger of Nirvana come from without Kurt Cobain's personal history? Where would the poetry of sixties America come from without Dillon's personal take on events? It is their honesty that makes rock legends the legends they are, without that honesty it's just a load of syrupy, emotionless pop. Safe and sterile. Should we reward rock stars with personal issues for their honesty and refusal to go quietly into the night? Hell yeah.

Our experiences make us who we are. Anybody who has the guts to sing or write about those experiences and then pour it out for the masses to mull over should be celebrated.

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