I don’t know many people who have heard of Mark Lanegan, much less listened to his music. This is perhaps more a reflection of the limitations of my social circle than his popularity. I first encountered Lanegan’s music on the soundtrack of the television show Lie to Me starring Tim Roth. The track was Kingdoms of Rain, credited to the band Soulsavers with whom Lanegan collaborated as a vocalist. Seventeen years since it remains my favourite song of all time: a brilliantly simple yet hauntingly beautiful piece of music, with the atmospheric quality of a church sermon, Lanegan its dark priest. And yet, this is no paean to religious redemption, no call to God, no confession of sins, no ode to self-pity. There is no morality being espoused here, no agenda.
Are those halos in your hair or diamonds shining there?
The only comparable song from my limited listening library is Johnny Cash’s Hurt, whose on-the-nose lyrics and video make it a bit melodramatic and self-indulgent in comparison, tempered only by Cash’s voice that truly carries the intended hurt and regret.
Lanegan’s voice – a truly unique, drawling baritone, that puts even old Johnny Cash to shame – resounds here with a sombre quality that could only emanate from a depth of pain, from a heart that has suffered and seen much, and cannot hold back from expressing itself with a mix of hope and resignation. It is the voice of a world-weary traveller, a creation of Dostoevsky – a man caught between the two sides of the coin of experience: self-assuredness and regret. For those keen to listen, here is a link to the youtube video of the song:
Recently I have been nursing a debilitating nostalgia that has brought me back to the heroes of my childhood, in search, perhaps, of simpler times. This lead me to buy one of Lanegan’s most popular records, Bubblegum, on vinyl, and a copy of his memoir Sing Backwards and Weep. I only found out he had written a biography when I stumbled upon the book in a Prague bookstore last year. At that time life seemed to be headed in a different direction and I refused to acquiesce to an obvious desire for nostalgic satisfaction. Unable to transcend this past obsession with the dark priest of blues and rock who had so captured my soul with his music, I relented a year later and read through the three-hundred-odd page book in two days.
The book is touted as the tell-all story of Lanegan’s initial years – his rise to semi-stardom and struggles with addiction and other self-destructive behaviors, which are par for the course for rockstars and musicians. The cover claims that it is eventually a story of redemption: how Lanegan braved these afflictions to become a great creator and musician. But upon reading it, I found that this purported happy ending is more marketing than reality, and that the story is not about Lanegan the musician but Lanegan the heroin addict. That Mark eventually became a notable musician in spite or because of his addictions is not the point and not even noteworthy in an industry which promotes degeneracy as a means to artistic expression. The unsettling question I was left with is: what kind of authenticity, pain, and meaning comes from degeneracy, addiction, and anti-social behavior?
It is a question I have struggled with before. It is a long-standing trope of modern television and film to have a dark, rebellious anti-hero who arrives at a true and moral understanding of the world after struggling with a tragic past, often with the help of drugs and other self-destructive afflictions. Think Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle from True Detective Season 1. But does this narrative not lend a false sense of profundity to drug use and performative edginess? Is it not a parody of Nietzscheian non-conformity and rugged individualism? Does it not discount the true building blocks of ruggedness, independence, self-reliance and authenticity: boring and painful things like life experience, taking responsibility of oneself and others, and holding fast to one’s values? I know so many middle-class family men and women, small business owner and working-class types, people who you wouldn’t look at twice, who know more about life than any of the edgy, counter-cultural, non-conformist, voluntary societal rejects who mistake the consequences of their poor choices as some kind of serious and transcendent life experience.
Lanegan’s recounts his shameful past with admirable self-awareness and without a shred of self-pity. While he spends considerable time on his abuse and neglect at the hands of his parents and his hatred of his deadbeat hometown of Ellensburg, he does not use these as an excuse for his self-destruction. These factors are just part of the recipe of a character inherently liable to excess, addiction, depression, and nihilism. As he himself writes while describing his moment of redemption in rehab in the book’s last chapter:
Lying there, sobbing in the grass for the first time ever, I stared directly and honestly into the mirror of my life. In an instant, I saw that my entire life’s way of thinking and behaving was the corrupted opposite of what it should be. My morbid thought process was the wrong side of right. I had grown up believing you took whatever you could from whoever you could and always looked out for number one, screwing anyone and everyone in the process. From my earliest childhood memories, I had been a thief and a flagrant, transparent, nonstop liar and cheat. Music, which I had loved, which I had lived for, which I credited with giving me a life, had long ago become just a means to an end: sex, money, drugs, a place to crash, a bargaining chip, a free ride, whatever I could milk from it. I had been a rank nihilist who lived each day with an obsessive, burning need to pay twice as hard anybody who fucked me…
Just as admirably, Lanegan does not credit his tragic childhood, nihilism, or even “struggles with addiction” as the creative impulses for his songwriting or music. He simply liked the music he liked, and while trying to emulate it and participate in it, caught some lucky breaks that allowed him to display his primary talent: his voice. Academically disinterested, unable to compromise for the greater good, and obsessively self-indulgent, Lanegan found in music his sole passion and enabler of the anti-social, hedonistic lifestyle he could not resist. The music industry fanned the flames of his vices, indulging his debilitating addictions as long as he churned out records and performances. The whole book reads like a sad indictment of the music scene, whose great heroes are a pathetic parody of Homer’s Greek gods – an incestuous group of psychotic and drug-addled superhumans who lord over mere mortals from their perch on Mount Olympus, granted divine status through a primordial gift of musical superpowers.
Lanegan wrote his memoirs in 2020, covering his life up to death of his close friend Layne Staley, the Alice in Chains lead vocalist, in 2002. Even with the benefit of hindsight and two decades of relative peace and success, the book is about Lanegan the addict, not Lanegan the musician. In film terms, one could call his music career the “framing device” for the actual story of addiction. While his genuine passion for authentic, real music is unmistakeable, it is eclipsed by the shadow of heroin clinging to every page and every sentence with an unholy stubbornness. Devoting only a handful of pages to his song-writing process and barely any to the lyrics or an explanation of them from the perspective of a self-taught song-writer and autodidactic poet, he goes into morbid detail about his daily heroin and crack cocaine rituals. Amongst sordid accounts of drug-addled antics of violence and humiliation, there are some fleeting but touching moments of goodwill he received from people he admired or even strangers – showing how much the odd gesture of kindness meant to him. At the same time, this raises the question of the extent to which clearly psychopathic, fiendish, and pathological behavior is encouraged and tolerated in the most worshipped and hallowed echelons of society, and what separates the average homeless junkie from a deified rockstar.
This brings me back to my love of Lanegan’s music and Kingdoms of Rain in particular. In that song I detected a pain and authenticity that captured my heart in a way that I haven’t been able to replicate since. Having now understood some of where that pain originated, and how it was channeled by this artist I idolized, I am left to wonder whether this kind of pain means anything at all. It is reminiscent of the scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov first meets Marmeladov. The latter’s tragic yet comical story is echoed in Mark Lanegan’s life, and one can’t help feel both contempt and pity for a man whose character will simply not let circumstances reform it, whose hardships are just as much self-created as they are imposed, who is a burden on others and fully aware of it, and who makes a mockery of those who extricated themselves productively, by faith and resolve, from similar conditions. Mark Lanegan’s achingly beautiful voice echoes like a Gregorian chant or a funeral elegy, taking me to a distant place I never knew I wanted to be. But to what degree does that ache, that pain, still resonate with me, as one who can never share his experiences and would not consider them worthy of redemption?
Sanchit Creates 
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