 This video is sponsored by Skillshare, for a limited time use the link in the description to get a free trial of Skillshare Premium. I turned 27 years old last week. As someone whose entire life is so closely tied to popular music, it's obviously a meaningful age for me. Many of my favorite musicians, including some that I spent years of my life idolizing, died at 27 years old. It's a phenomenon known as the 27 Club, brilliant musical minds being struck down in their prime, often due to addiction and mental illness. The myth was born when, in the space of two years, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janice Joplin all died at 27 years old. But it's not just those four, since then we've lost many more musicians at the age of 27, most notably Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. A favorite story that many people linked to the 27 Club is Robert Johnson, who allegedly sold his soul to the devil and laid the foundations for rock and roll before dying at 27. Indeed, the myth of Johnson's Faustian bargain is sometimes extended into our discussions of other 27 Club members. And honestly, I can see why. It's a really compelling story, tortured geniuses, touched by darkness who used their brief time on this planet to innovate and inspire. I used to love these stories. Early on in Polyphonic, I even made an entire video on the 27 Club. But a few days before it was set to release, I scrapped it, and I'm glad that I did. I don't think it was a bad video by any means. It described the strange phenomenon, and I was careful to talk about the tragedy of it all. But still, in some way, even just by telling the story of the 27 Club, I think I would have been helping to romanticize it. We pretend that we don't romanticize these things, but I think a lot of us do. I know I certainly used to. When I was 16 years old, I had big dreams. I was going to be an iconoclastic rock star. I sat in my room writing cheesy lyrics and blasting Nirvana records. I dressed as Kurt Cobain for Halloween and watched every interview I could get my hands on. I even read his journals, which were published and sold years after his death without his consent. I wish I could say that back then, I thought the publishing of these journals was a gross violation of privacy. But I didn't. I loved the journals, and I dreamed that someday my own teenage musings would be poured over by a new generation of would-be artists. Back in those days, 27 felt so far off. So old. At 27, you could have accomplished so much, and your best years were behind you anyways. For a time, I really believed the words that Neil Young wrote, and Kurt Cobain quoted in his Suicide Note. It's better to burn out than to fade away. In his autobiography, Waging Heavy Piece, Neil Young described the effect that finding out about Cobain's Suicide Note had on him. When he died and left that note, it struck a deep chord inside of me. It fucked with me. When Cobain died, Neil Young had actually been trying to reach out to him, trying to help him cope with the pressures of stardom. But Cobain never got to have that meeting with one of his idols. I don't believe that it's better to burn out than to fade away anymore. I dream of fading away, slowly dropping out of the spotlight and living a good, long life with close family and good friends. 27 doesn't feel quite as old as it used to now. Last year, one of my best friends in the entire world attempted suicide shortly before her 27th birthday. I'm eternally grateful that she's still alive today. She's one of the most talented artists that I've ever known, and the world needs writers like her to be alive, now more than ever. Since that event, I've been thinking a lot about the 27 Club, and the ways that we look at mental illness within the music community. We're very eager to talk about the link between creativity and mental illness. We look at Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Brian Wilson, Kanye West, and so many more, and we say maybe the demons that they fight are necessary for them to create their art. Some of these artists, like Brian Wilson and Kanye West, have even said as much publicly. I don't want to discount these people's experience, but I think this is something that we exaggerate in our society, and we do so to a lot of people's detriment. Mental illness and addiction are not necessary for greatness, and the world is missing so much greatness because of mental illness and addiction. When Jimi Hendrix overdosed on barbiturates and alcohol, he had so much left to offer. There was talk of Hendrix collaborating with Miles Davis, a team up that surely would have shook the musical landscape as we know it. One of the last songs he developed before his death was Machine Gun, an absolute triumph in his career, and by the same measure, one of the most iconic moments of Kurt Cobain's entire life, the MTV Unplugged set, happened just a few months before his death. In my own personal opinion, I think Nirvana's final album in utero might be their best work. It shows so much promise for a next stage of Nirvana that we never got to experience. It's not just the 27 Club either. Nick Drake died at 26, two years after releasing his seminal work, Pink Moon. Drake is often celebrated as a kind of prototypical, tragic hero, a tortured soul who used his trauma to create art that the world didn't appreciate until after he died. But the reality of Nick Drake is more complicated than that. Drake's sister and his close friend Robert Kirby have both attested to the fact that Drake was often a happy, joyful person, and it was in those moments of peace and joy that he was able to write and record his music. Mental illness is a traumatic experience, and it's true, trauma does often birth great art. But I don't think that's something unique to mental illness. David Bowie's Black Star was written to process the trauma of a terminal cancer diagnosis. Much of John Darnell's music was born out of his experiences with an abusive stepfather. Now I'm not saying that you need trauma to create great art either, but art can be a way of working through that trauma, and that's part of what I think happens with mental illness. We see people using music to work through their own struggles, and we start to believe that it's the illness, not the artist, creating the great work. I don't believe that it's mental illness creating art that launches people to fame. I believe that finding fame from your art can often lead to mental illness. When you look at the circumstances around the deaths of the 27 Club, you can see a pattern emerging. Before his death, Jimi Hendrix's mental health was deteriorating. He was feeling paranoid and exhausted by the constant deluge of pressure from a press that was eager to label him as the new king of guitar. This was compounded by the physical demands of an intensive touring schedule and the heavy partying lifestyle that inevitably seems to surround rock stars. And Kurt Cobain's career was constantly plagued by media pressure. He was only 24 years old when he was labeled the voice of his entire generation. That kind of pressure can get to somebody. And then of course there's the tragic story of Amy Winehouse. By all accounts, Winehouse had no real desire to be famous. She didn't want the weight and pressure that came with it. But her distinct voice and singular talent turned her into an unwilling star. For the entirety of Winehouse's short career, she was hounded by British tabloids that were out for blood. Her struggles with addiction played out on a public stage as paparazzi followed her around constantly, and tabloids were always ready with a comment on her appearance and weight. At 25 years old, Winehouse expressed fears that she would soon be joining the 27 Club. And of course, she did. I can't truly speak to what was going on in Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain's head at the height of their success, but I can speak about my experiences. Through my work with Polyphonic, I've achieved the smallest fraction of fame, but even that has been enough to wreak havoc on my mental health. Now let me be clear, I am insanely fortunate. I have an incredibly cool job, and I am grateful every day for all of the people that have helped to make it happen. But like any job, being a public figure has its downsides. There's the weight of expectation. Everybody wants me to espouse the ideals that they imagine I have. Everyone has a relationship with this shadow self, this character of Polyphonic that bears a passing resemblance to me, but isn't me. And then of course, there's the comments. I know that YouTuber complaining about their comments section is a cliche, and I'll probably lose some of my subscribers from this. People who will say, yeah, suck it up, people are mean on the internet. But the reality is that these things stick with you. Ask anyone who has a public presence, and they'll tell you that the praise can wash over, but the smallest comments will work their way into the most insidious parts of your brain and needle at you, keeping you awake, tossing and turning for hours. The suck it up mentality is exactly what leads to people like myself not acknowledging the impact that my work has on my mental health. It leads to me believing that these aren't legitimate issues, that these aren't things that I can talk about to the people I love. And last year, it led to me standing on the balcony of my ninth floor apartment, staring down into the alley below. I'm not saying this to complain, because honestly, I'd still take my job over pretty much anything else. I'm saying this because I think that we need to have better conversations around mental health, especially as an increasing number of us live our lives in the public sphere. In the fall of 2018, I moved across the country and I lost a lot of my support systems in the process. I worked long hours in a tiny windowless room and spent far too much time looking at what people said about me online. It took its toll. I once began to creep into my head and soon they became all consuming. I felt like I was spending every ounce of energy that I had just fighting them off. I threw myself into my work and that only made things worse. I didn't want to die, not in the slightest, but there was a part of my brain that was constantly nagging at me, telling me that this was the best way out. The only way out. It wasn't. I'm incredibly grateful that I'm surrounded by wonderful people that eventually helped pull me out of that place. I'm doing a lot better now, but my mental health is still far from what it once was. I get anxiety attacks sometimes when I think about the people watching me in my work. They got really bad this year, but they're getting better. I'm in the middle of a search for therapy and most days I feel pretty good. In a weird way I got what my 16-year-old self dreamed of. Sure, I'm not a rock star, but I do have hundreds of thousands of followers and I do struggle with a lot of the baggage that comes along with that. It's not nearly as glamorous as I once thought. I don't really know how to bring this video to a close. I think that we as a society need to reframe our discussions around mental health and our discussions around celebrity. We need to stop expecting so much from the artists that we love. We need to let them be their own person and we need to stop glorifying whatever's going on in their head. A lot of people have asked for a video on the 27 Club. Here you go. You have it now. I'm sure a lot of you are going to be disappointed by it, but this is what I have to say. Now, can we stop talking about the 27 Club? Can we stop pretending that this is some special group of people touched by otherworldly experience? Let's in stand remember that the 27 Club are just a handful of the millions of people that have struggled with mental illness. Let's do what we can to support those who have mental illness, whatever their age might be, to create a world where we can talk about these things, to create a world where we don't glorify these horrible experiences. And let's fight to create a world where we don't need to lose so many great minds before their time. I wasn't sure about having an ad on this video, but I've decided it's going to afford me an opportunity to do my part. So I'm going to donate a thousand dollars from the ad that you're about to watch to the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to helping us better understand and treat mental illness. I often get people asking me advice on how to start their own YouTube channel like mine. Now, if you're going to do this, there's a lot of things to keep in mind, but first and foremost, you're going to need to learn to use a video editing software. Personally, my software of choice is the Adobe Creative Suite, in particular After Effects. So if you want to learn to do motion graphics like mine, a great place to start is Evan Abrams' Introduction to Adobe After Effects on Skillshare. 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