The Silverchair Dilemma

Silverchair frontman's confession

"I didn't realize the noise was in my head"

I used to be madly fond of Silverchair. I wouldn't say I was a superfan or anything, but suffice it to say, this was the music of my teenage years; the music that sticks with you whether you like it or not (And that's a paradox in itself- I mean, how do you love something you hate?).

Here's the thing: It's paradoxes which are the things that stick with us. Especially when our own lives are paradoxical. I always had a lot of noise in my head. Teenage years are full of paradoxes. It fit the moment. This was music that said that things aren't meant to work out and somehow still held a kind of shimmering beauty. That there's point of no awakening while you're lying in the mud and there's nothing to say, all of whihc might pass for a kind of fraudulent version of Nirvana,- the ultimate cop-out - a belief that nothing that can get you out of whatever situation you're in. You can't even pep-talk yourself out of that kind of maelstrom "cos that's cheesy". And so, I enjoyed the noise. I engaged in the self-deprecation. Even to swine who would pull me down further for it. You could sail a Silverchair over suicidal noise because it was continually cutting off it's own head while staggering and singing blood out of its own gargling voice-pipe. It was a sick and broken noise and it was trying to do that to the ultimate degree using broken words to dark Beatles-esque melodies in B minor.

And of course, there was the noise. I wouldn't have loved them without the noise. Noise is nothing more than sound fighting against itself. 2 or 3 times I found myself at at Nirvana tribute concert and put my neck out without realizing it by thrashing it so hard that the bloodflow would constrain my brain for years to come until a chiropractor set it right 16 or so years later... And then when I was tired I used to go and sleep and disappear from everything. Mom would sort everything out in any case. And the only gospel that mattered to me was Nirvana's music, because silverchair was a low-grade rip-off that tried to outdo them but failed miserably. Nirvana - the band - understood me. And to an extent, Siverchair. That was blissful - the absurdity of it all - knowing everything was about escaping by cutting up common sense. Cue the cut-up method of Burroughs. I'd escape through pot, and I escaped so far that I actually ended up in a severe state of mentally obliterative psychosis. (What a mouthful. Glad I don't have grammarly here to tell me what to do.) In any case, when I see this bloke, I kind of just feel sorry for him. There's no admiration. I don't even like whatever oddball jewelery he's wearing to look edgy. He was never that tough to begin with. A bit like me. I was a sensitive kid too. He was always destined to be broken, like I was, although he was much more hopeless than me arguably. He'll always have a hot girl he can call and I don't have that but then again (*smh), what happened to his notion of love? Probably it's non-existent, or completely jaded. Right now I'm actually bored even thinking of him. I want to read Bukowski now and just remember that the noise isn't the point. It'll do the opposite, but that dirt of rockstar feelings is so engrained in me that I feel drawn to it still. Maybe some of it's good. ButI should probably read the synoptic gospels instead. Nor is having fun the point. (Bukowski is fun, but what does it do for the soul). But I have a pivot point from obliteration. through fasting and staying at home: Meditating; Disappearing and being broken are kissing cousins. At least Buk was able to face life through to a ripe old age though. . . I'm not calling him a saint or anything but he put a lot of people out of their misery through charm and wit. As you can see, my writing style is garbled After all, Buk also switched a lot of people onto adultery, and kept the furnaces of hell blooming with his vintage. You could argue that the ideas he had had the music of hell in them. Charming on the surface, but in the end, unsurvivable. "What a crazy circus" he said. That's his view of life, and he lived it out and made it that way for many. Well, in any case, we're here to talk about this Daniel Johns guy. I remember that for high school, I couldn't get a date. I went to a boy's only school and so my feel for Silverchair's music, for me at least, was informed by the art room aesthetic of a certain school in Cape Town. The art room was a crazy place to be. It was filled with future yuppies; One of them, Grant Campbell would go on to make ads for testicular cancer and win awards too. The testicle is just sitting on the couch talking in a way that rings true for many low brow South African yuppies. Grant was a real elitist. One of the "cool ones." He didn't have time for normies, and his hipster future was secured through a wealthy set of parents. And then at break time there were less elite people in that art room. In fact they were considered the losers. I liked them more. If there was an Ozzy Osbourne, he would have been birthed there. But I used to mock them to the cool kids, once right in front of their face, because I was in with one of them. I was a bit of Judas. So in any case, I was into making basic art. I mean not hipster in any sense. Art with Kurt Cobain in a Cannabis leaf for an album cover that looked like crud mixed in with crud. No visible face, no discernable features in the dope leaves. In the end it all mirrored my mental state of mud. When the time for the matric ball came around - the equivalent of a prom in the States or Canada - I had no-one to go with. I had spoken to a beautiful girl in my town who would be one of the drug addicts of the future before she went onto air hostessing. She was a stunner. But like all future drug addicts, she would have a jealously guarding boyfriend. First it looked like it was on. It started out when my mom went to her mom and asked if I could go with her. At the time, my mom was being viciously abused by her own boyfriend. Sometimes emotionally, most times verbally, but ultimately what would end it was my going insane. She was also decent, and from a decent family, so this was especially disturbing to her and I. We've never quite recovered. So anyway as luck, as it would have it, there had to be a dick in every pie, so the girl who had originally promised to go on the date with me wouldn't.

Another asshole of a guy, Neil Allan, mocked me about her name, which was dutch (Anja). She was swarthy and beautiful, and I was able to brag about her. But when the time came around, there was no one and nothing. Just a jealous boyfriend who probably was toxic like all boyfriends of girls who are 16 and have alcoholic fathers.

She was fairly kind though, and I ended up having to go with this other girl, a friend of hers. Sarah someone. It was lame as hell. This girl looked like a damn mouse crossed with a horse. And she was up her own ass. And my friend, a black guy from Uganda who had earlier made a bomb threat as a joke in our school, wanted me to swap with his date during the course of the evening. He liked mine more. But not being a jerk, I said it was unfair to his date. But his date would later turn around and diss my taste in music to my own up-her-ass prom date. "Silverchair? Oh they sing this really silly stuff like "Kill myself by holding my breath."... As if my luck hadn't turned out bad enough, I had to deal with someone calling out my music as uncool. Just when I was trying to impress my unimpressive date.