Alice In Chains - Dirt

Tonight it's Alice In Chains' second album Dirt. It's about the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet, the lion headed daughter of Ra whose fiery breath shears the land to desert. I'm joking, it's about Layne Staley's herion addiction, and how that basically defined him as a person. It's about other things too, but it's an explicitly autobiographical album from the perspective of a serious junkie.

It's also a real world coincidence kind of album. Remember how Bowie's Heathen was interrupted by September 11? Well, AIC were tuning their guitars when the verdict of the Rodney King trial was being read, and LA decided it was time to have a riot. Back up. I hate that phrase, police officers were the defendents on trial and they were excused from punishment for unnecessarily beating the shit out of him, which they were filmed doing. Eventually, two of them saw the reverse angle of prison. Needless to say, Jerry Cantrell's afternoon run to the gas station for beer was a little more frightening than he expected, so they picked up their friend Tom from Slayer and hid out in the desert for a week before starting to record.

This isn't grunge either. It's alternative metal... fine, grungy alternative metal if you're just unable to stop chasing that dragon. His relationships are crap, his dad's nickname really was Rooster during the Vietnam not officially a war, and the second half is Layne's own journey from naive acupuncturist to a guy who wished he wasn't addicted to heroin anymore. If we're being honest, his equally alcoholic bandmates probably weren't the most stable of support systems. Not bad kids, just stupid ones, as Axl so succinctly put it.

If there's a moral to the story of Dirt, it's that we're all pretty good at trying to kill ourselves, and that's pretty pointless considering we're going to die anyway. They never meant this album to be a glorification of how miserable they really were, and they didn't like it when fans bragged about how high THEY were while asking for autographs. More tragically, that's not an ironic situation. It's the reality of idiotic reverse pathology: telling people how horrible something is just makes them want to do it more.

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