In the spring of 1995, I experienced my very first punk show. It was Rancid with the Lunachicks at the Metro in Chicago. I was 15. And in that crowd of about 1,000, I felt like I belonged. I had found my tribe. It was a moment that would transport me on a decades-long excursion, one that finds my punk rock heart still beating now and forever.
Music is an intensely powerful and hellaciously galvanizing force. It fuels our existence, feeds the mind, and scorches the soul. Some of us get goosebumps when we hear our favorite music. In my case, I heard some live music recently that brought back some intense memories of an old boyfriend, who is no longer with us.
After video game addiction was recognized as a disorder by the World Health Organization in 2018, some other studies and academic papers are showing that video games can actually be therapeutic.
There’s no longer a stigma about coming out as having bipolar disorder. It is becoming more commonplace to openly discuss mood disorders, as evidenced by the number of celebrities who’ve publicly disclosed their diagnoses. Bebe Rexha is the latest to come out.
With his trademark sky-blue Fender Mustang guitar and godforsaken, angst-ridden scream of a voice, Kurt Cobain mobilized a generation of freaks and geeks in the early ‘90s, knocking Michael Jackson off the top of the Billboard charts and chaperoning the mainstream into a new age of enlightenment fueled by punk and alternative rock. For Generation…
After a psychotic episode in 2015, rocker Scott Stapp received a bipolar diagnosis. At the top of his game, Stapp was the leader of Creed, a popular hard-rock band in the late ‘90s that sold 10 million records. The rocker returns with a new single.
British electronic band The Prodigy announced that its singer Keith Flint had taken his own life, found dead in his home of Essex, UK, on Monday.
Tonight at the Academy Awards, Lady Gaga won Best Song for “Shallow” from the movie “A Star Is Born.” But it was at the Grammys earlier this month that she shined a spotlight on mental illness.
The winter of 2018 featured a flurry of upstanding films exploring addiction — from Beautiful Boy to A Star Is Born and now Ben Is Back, starring Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges. A glimpse into the world of addiction, Ben Is Back reinforces the idea that addiction is a family disease. The movie is also a testimony to how the opioid addiction can affect any community.
Beautiful Boy is haunting me. I can’t stop thinking about the film after seeing it in the theater alone this past Saturday morning. While I never did crystal meth, I used to do several hardcore drugs and Beautiful Boy forced me to revisit those terrifying memories.
