When Music’s Sad Boys Chase Happiness
In the recent anthology It’s Not OK to Feel Blue (And Other Lies): Inspirational People Open Up About Their Mental Health, the musician James Blake wrote about the particular feeling of being straight, white, male, and sad. His point, he wrote, was “not to make anyone feel sorry for me, but to show how a privileged, relatively rich-and-famous-enough-for-zero-pity white man could become depressed, against all societal expectations and allowances.” He understood that he’d been born lucky—but also felt that him knowing his luck, and everyone else knowing it, only compounded his mental-health struggles. The “normalized stigmatization of male musicians’ emotional expression in the media,” he added, made him feel like “the ‘Sadboy Prince and the Pea.’”
It was a thoughtful and well-intentioned essay. As Blake noted, white men face and stigmas against asking for help. But the cultural context regarding some of Blake’s assertions is complicated. In music history, are men dismissed for showing emotion? Does society really not want to hear about or understand white male depression? The mega-fame of Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, and so many other morose stars would seem to say otherwise. So would Blake’s best-selling, bummed-out songs. is one of the most celebrated of all emotions in popular music.
