My man Ezra flipped a sweet Dazed article about music and heroin into our {R}emnants mag on Flipboard yesterday, and sitting down to post it caught my eye. Here’s a bit from Dazed…
But heroin has consistently eluded this ebb and flow, from its prominence and influence in the jazz and blues era of the 30s, 40s and 50s (Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Chet Baker) to the rockers of the 60s, 70s, and 80s (Keith Richards, Sid Vicious, Nikki Sixx) and the heroin chic trend of the 90s, made popular by Calvin Klein’s ‘waif’ models and further pushed by the grunge movement (Kurt Cobain, Hole, Alice In Chains, and more).
In the 21st century – and specifically in the United States – the opioid epidemic is now at an all time-high, with The New York Times citing it as “a modern plague” with 59,000 drug overdose deaths in 2016 alone, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the US. With the country’s “drug-infested dens” (as President Trump so tactfully described earlier this year) becoming a national crisis, the topic of heroin addiction is coming out from under the bridge…
Follow the article link above to hear a playlist of heroin’s greatest hits. The list is jammed with rock and funk, but when I think of heroin and music I think of Miles and Coltrane and Bill Evans — I think of jazz. Here’s Bruce Weber’s poetic black and white study of Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost…
Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts
