Music & Culture

A lot of the greatest musicians we grew up listening to used some form of drug including alcohol. Drugs and alcohol are known for distorting things and making it hard to be yourself. But why do many musicians rely on drugs including alcohol so much? Is it because they can simply afford it? Are drugs and alcohol more accessible when you are famous? Do they feel more attractive or accepted if they do drugs or alcohol? Are they not comfortable enough with themselves that they have to block out who they truly are in order to feel better about themselves? Then questions are endless.

I think that musicians use chemical substances for every reason possible. Some drugs like LS D gives you hallucinations and many can’t function with reality so they turn to drugs to take their mind off things. Some drugs cause you to forget things or not be fully there and some people like that feeling. Some drugs can make you feel numb to a certain extent to emotions or physical pain and therefore people use drugs. I think it is all connected to people with troubled lives that want to numb and forget about their current lives and not think about what personal issues they have by masking them with who you are when you do drugs.

Some drugs probably enhance creativity because the drugs make you hallucinate and take you to a place where everything not normal becomes normal. On the other hand, drugs can kill your brain cells therefore you start losing who you are completely and become unreliable and forgetful of things. Drugs can impair everything from you vision to reaction time. Therefore, if drugs can cause car accidents, they can also detract from the creativity process. Most artists that do drugs are very forgetful and probably have a hard time writing a song because of it.

One well known artist that turned to drugs was Ray Charles. He had an unfortunate disability of being blind and had enough struggles in life because of it. He got introduced to drugs as a musician because his friends were all doing it. Unfortunately he became very dependent on these drugs to where he could not simply stop. He had a great gift in piano playing and writing and singing music. However, the fame did not last very long because his drug use became public. The artist was arrested three times for his addiction to drugs. Ray was always very jittery after being on drugs. He was never proud of using these drugs and getting arrested for possession did not help his career. I did hear that he quit cold turkey which is not something that many can do. Once in your system, your body needs it to function and you need more of it as time goes by to get the same effect because people become so dependent on it. I don’t know that drugs affected his creativity because he was called the king of soul and was a very respected and creative artist.