Mann, Fraser (2025) ‘A tidal wave of dopesickness’: Addiction, music and pathography in Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep. In: Attah, Tom, Lloyd, Christian and Fairclough, Kirsty, (eds.) Rereading Musicians and Their Audiences: Popular Music Autobiographies. New York, Bloomsbury

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Abstract

‘A tidal wave of dopesickness’: Addiction, music and pathography in Mark Lanegan’s Sing Backwards and Weep
Published in 2020, the late Mark Lanegan’s first memoir received critical acclaim and commercial success. Lanegan’s heroin addiction and the damage done to his body drew familiar tropes from reviewers and from the music press. The text’s page on its publisher’s website includes three quotations that use variations of the term ‘brutal honesty’ while its own copy describes the book as ‘gritty, gripping and unflinchingly raw’. Such market placement speaks to some of the traditions associated with rock memoir written by men. Texts from the metal world by acts such as Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne and those from baby boomer figures such as Keith Richards are replete with exaggerated tales of debauchery and abandon. Drugs and addiction are central in these narratives and fall back on mythic and gendered constructions of excess.
Sing Backwards and Weep is, however, more complex than this. Its affectless narration offers movements and flux between temporal versions of selfhood. It is a text that ‘embraces the partial, mutable, fragmentary and subjective nature of past events’ (Edgar, Mann, Pleasance 4). So, despite the familiar ground, this memoir generates new modes of thinking about the body, musical culture and creativity.
This chapter takes this as its jumping off point in examining the manner in which this memoir can be read as a pathography. Coined by Anne Hunsaker-Hawkins in 1993, pathography is ‘a form of autobiography that that describes personal experiences of illness, treatment and sometimes death’ (1). It is a form that that ‘concern[s] the attempts of individuals to orient themselves in the world of sickness’ (2). Used widely in narratives of terminal and chronic illness and in testimonies regarding psychological and mental health, it is a form that allows for engagement with cultural and mythic understandings of illness and how they contrast with individual corporeal experiences.
In Sing Backwards and Weep, the focus is on heroin addiction and the manner in which this mediates the social and creative world inhabited by Mark Lanegan. With his band Screaming Trees, he is a central figure in the grunge boom of the early 1990s. Seattle, previously a rainy and blue-collar city situated outside of America’s metropolitan focus, is suddenly illuminated and becomes both a national and trans global site for fashion, media and commerce. In the thirty years since, it has become a mythologised space. The city’s heroin culture in particular has been romanticised, glorified and mediated. Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994 is seen as both the end of the grunge era and the beginning of the music’s totemic status in American underground culture.
Lanegan undercuts this all of this by placing his body in the centre of his narrative. It filters experiences that are personal and marginal as well as those more familiar to audiences well versed in grunge mythology. Elaine Scarry suggests that narrating pain is futile due to its ‘resistance to language’ (4) and because it has ‘no referential content’ (5). This chapter then, analyses the ways that Lanegan meets this narrative paradox.

Works Cited
Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker. Reconstructing illness: Studies in Pathography.. Purdue University Press, 1999.
Edgar, Robert, Fraser Mann, and Helen Pleasance, eds. Music, Memory and Memoir. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, USA, 1985.
Key Words:
Pathography, addiction, grunge, Seattle, memoir

Item Type:	Book Section
Status:	Published
Subjects:	M Music and Books on Music > ML Literature of music P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN3311 Prose. Prose fiction P Language and Literature > PR English literature P Language and Literature > PS American literature
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/11014

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