Singers With a Death Wish

They're dead famous, dead cool and dead tragic, but did certain singers who died young predict it in their lyrics?

Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse all have a few things in common; they're impossibly cool, universally adored and eternally dead. Burnt up and spat out into an early grave at a tragically young age. Victims of the same rock n' roll lifestyle which put them on a pedestal, celebrated their vices, whitewashed their weaknesses, exploited their talents and blindsided them hook, line and sinker, before leaving them to rot. 

Exactly why they died well before their time is debatable, but one thing is for certain, their lifestyles and lyrics all conspired to make their sudden deaths less shocking than if it happened to more mediocre talents and less forceful personalities. 

All of the aforementioned rock n' roll casualties were renowned for having their finger firmly on the self-destruct button in one way or another during their short lives. A factor which is nowhere more evident than in the words of certain songs they sung while the heart was still beating and the rock was rolling. With this in mind, let's play musical sleuth and unearth the lines from certain songs which reveal, if not a blatant death wish on behalf of the singer in question, at least a morbid curiosity in their own demise. 

The Doors - The End 

It's fair to say that the Lizard King Jim Morrison was obsessed with death. He wrote reams of poetry about the Grim Reaper during his short tenure on this mortal coil and a fair few songs too - most memorably the 11 minute oedipal psychedelic epic that is 'The End'. When a serious young man obsessed with LSD and Nietzsche croons "This is the end, my only friend the end," you know he's a car crash waiting to happen. Jimbo's own end came in a Paris bathtub when he died from a suspected heroin overdose. Interestingly, one of the last songs Morrison recorded (Hyacinth House) contains the enigmatic line, "I see the bathroom is near." Go figure. 

Nirvana - All Apologies 

The last song on the last album that Kurt Cobain ever recorded reads like a suicide note to the world. It's not angry and frantic but despairing and resigned as if the Nirvana singer had already made up his mind to stick a shotgun in his mouth and violently blow his brains out. World weary lyrics such as "What else should I be? All apologies," and a philosophically meaningless refrain which solemnly intones "All in all is all we are," reek of a soul ravaged by ennui and sick with experience. Fame and fortune had numbed Cobain to his present and made his future bleak. Consequently the only exit he considered available to him would also be his last. 

Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart 

It was grim up North during the heyday of Joy Division and Ian Curtis's lyrics encapsulated the Manchester misery and dreary despair on an industrial scale. Pretty much any of the strangely beautiful words which fell from Curtis's dour mouth like poisoned poetry were larger than life clues to the inner turmoil and dark forces which compelled him to hang himself. Yet one song stands head and shoulders above the rest. In one sense, 'Love Will Love Tear Us Apart' is nothing more than an ode to a relationship turned sour, but on the other hand, lines like, "And there's a taste in my mouth as desperation takes hold," suggest an existential despair which was always going to get the better of Curtis. 

Jimi Hendrix - I Don't Live Today 

Like a guitar wielding spaceman from another planet with crazy clothes and crazy hair, Jimi Hendrix was an otherworldly talent who performed songs of such majesty it seemed impossible that such a talent could be allowed to live for long. He wasn't, but before he ingested a lethal cocktail of amphetamine, sleeping pills and red wine, which caused him to choke to death on his own vomit, Hendrix had written plenty of songs with dying on their mind, one of them being the aptly titled 'I Don't Live Today'. In this red raw rocker of a track, Jimi describes how he feels like he's sitting at the bottom of a grave, before casually asking the universe, "Will I live tomorrow? Well, I just can't say." Hendrix's apparent indifference to his own mortality would a few short years later quite literally cost him his life. 

Amy Winehouse - Back To Black 

Although in death she has become acclaimed and revered, the simple sad truth is that during her short career Amy's alcoholic and drug-fuelled antics amused us and often overshadowed her true talent - which of course was her voice. A voice which never sounded better than on 'Back To Black', a song about a doomed love which is never going to go the distance. Obviously, when a lover walks out on you it's always going to be an upsetting experience but to cry, "You go back to her and I go back to black," seems to suggest a morbid hypersensitivity and slight fixation with the abyss of no return. Winehouse eventually went back to black for good, when she died all alone in her London flat with nothing but a couple of empty vodka bottles for company.