Did You Kill Urbandub and Sugarfree and Kamikazee?

Problem: 

Urbandub died. Kamikazee, too. Eraserheads. Sugarfree. All these bands are great. All these bands killed themselves. Which leads you to ask: do great bands and artists intentionally kill themselves as part of the greatness package or is their death a consequence of fame, and so the best way to let musicians live is to not support them because by listening to their music, you might be contributing to the fame that leads to suicide? 

There is a joke from Sarah Silverman where she asks someone, "Are you a musician?" and then the person answers, "No". Then she goes, "Oh then, well you should get a haircut." I don't know what that joke has to do with the problem, but just inserting that seems to be the an artistic way to segue into the main statement of this problem, which is:

Do we slowly kill musicians by supporting their music? 

Solutions:

1. Consider Piracy

I watched the Kurt Cobain's documentary "Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck" weeks before the first ever Beer and Roast Music Festival, an event organized by Cafe Racer and Mooon Cafe in association with Cebu Blogging Community and Bisaya Short Films featuring Razorback, Junior Kilat, Franco, et al.

The Cobain documentary implied three things:

• You could end up killing yourself when you do drugs because your mind gets so warped up from the heroin etc. that you want to compress all the pleasures you're able to get your whole life into one 5-second inhale of a hit, and that means your whole amount of pleasure reserves get dried up after the shot. 

• And you want death because you begin the "what's the point of life without getting any pleasure?" mentality.

• Divorced parents can get your children to grow long hair, become world art legends and then kill themselves and we use David Foster Wallace, Robin Williams and Kurt Cobain as our examples.

• If you rebel against something, that something rebels against you by making money out of your rebellion, labelling your Rebellion as something like "Rebellion Is Cool Beer: The Beer For Rebels" and you lose because people love your rebellion for reasons that your rebellion is not about. 

• From this, it's not unfair to conclude that: if you don't make bands famous then you're not an enabler of the kind of life choices that get them killed. Which brings us to piracy. Piracy gets you to listen to the artists' work without fuelling the corporate machineries that generate fame for artists because the corporate gets no money. Fame kills. Fame is a source of addiction that could get you killed. Fame is Malaria, and if we get rid of it, we save more lives. 

From this, we say: Piracy kills Fame. Fame kills lives. Go figure.

2. Consider Drug Addiction

Can anyone tweet at @BisayaFilms a study linking suicide with drug addiction and a statistics on how many high-level artists who did drugs killed themselves? For now, we have Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain.

We learned from Jessica Zafra that drugs don't make artists great because artists are already great before the addiction. But are they? 

The Cobain docu suggests that: who are we to say that drug addiction could destroy your life when we consider the fact that if Kurt Cobain didn't do the drugs, he couldn't have gotten through his downward spiral that brings people to suicide? 

Should we then dismiss drugs as life-damaging when drugs made a person want to live more another day to figure out what's next? Drugs help you cope for a day, some would say.

But drugs destroy your life that you saved that one day for. Which means: drugs still get you killed, but at least you lived.

3. Consider Abandoning Your Childen.

Abandoned children could get parents in a lot of trouble, but so does living in a normal life with children, as evidenced by the child in the movie We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

So it just goes that either you abandon your kids or not, you can still get your children so depressed that they might kill themselves. 

Research shows that the answer is to lessen the chances of damage for children and in Cobain's documentary, we seem to see that:

1. Not doing drugs,
2. Living with your children from birth to forever and
3. Employing regimented diet and exercise

is the only answer to getting a life less miserable than Kurt Cobain's.

But then again, if it weren't for Kurt's suicide, we wouldn't have enjoyed his staggering genius music. Confused? You're not alone. "But don't overthink and don't be too hard on yourself and just party, okay?" says a Tshirt a preacher wears.