Lately, the damned are seen in better colors. As if someone had forced them to walk in the sun or do yoga at seven in the morning. The figure of the tormented, marginal and self-destructive artist, who has fascinated audiences for decades, has faded in an era obsessed with well-being, where emotional and physical health are a priority. People want to live longer and better. And that, staying all night writing poems in the dark corner of a bar, between hoarse and tobacco smoke, it’s generally complicated.
Even Lana del Rey has switched to vaping. But it’s not the only one. Last year, before appearing dressed as a nun on the cover of Luxsaid Rosalía in Omegahis song with Ralphie Choo: “I don’t drink anymore, I don’t smoke anymore, I don’t use and I show it off.” Stop bragging about smoking lots of joints or taking lines of cocaine “like M-30.” Drunkards are lazy. Pride is sober. If someone wants to boast about something, it is better to do it for several days in a row without failing in their efforts. gym or have scored 90 out of 100 on the Sleep Cycle app. Even Fernando Gálvez, aka Yung Beef, cursed among the cursed, entered a rehab clinic last year to leave the bad life. “I ended up connecting with my inner child,” said the man who was the great pioneer of trap in Spain.
One of the symptoms of the turn from curses towards the culture of well-being This is how the vampire myth changed. The character was born with Polidori, an Italian doctor who accompanied Shelley and Lord Byron during this famous summer told by Gonzalo Suárez in Row in the wind (1988). From this literary game was born Frankenstein and also the vampirewhose protagonist is inspired by Byron himself: seductive, hedonistic, dedicated to excess. A total curse. More than a century later, after countless adaptations, the vampire of our time is Bryan Johnson, the billionaire who wants to live to be 150, eats dinner at eleven thirty in the morning and boasts of drinking his son’s blood.
The global wellness industry reached a valuation of $6.32 trillion in 2023, according to the Global Wellness Institute. This is an increase of 26% compared to 2019. At the same time, an entire economic, cultural and medical ecosystem has been structured around the promise of living longer. The new socio-economic status is that of youth and longevity. In 2024, nearly 6,000 have been published papers on longevity in PubMed, five times more than twenty years ago. The Financial Times reports that in the financial centers of London and New York, people have stopped bragging about impossible schedules or miles traveled by plane: pride now resides in the eight hours of sleep recorded by an Oura ring or in the minutes endured during a cryotherapy session.
The cursed artists
This trend goes against one of the characteristic traits of cursed artists: the brevity of their lives. The most obvious case is the famous 27 Clubscomposed of musicians who died prematurely – Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse – who over time became an essential part of the mythology of the curse. There are those who don’t even fit into this so-called canon because they left before, like Ian Curtis, the leader of Joy Division, who died at the age of 23. Or Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamont, poet and author of The songs of Maldoror (1869), admired by the group of surrealists of André Breton, who died at 24.
The cult of cursing comes from afar. There have always been characters ready to self-destruct, and we have surely always found something fascinating in them. The first to name this line of artists was the French poet Paul Verlaine, in his book The cursed poets (1884). He analyzes the figure of several French authors, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, Verlaine’s ex-lover, then already retired from poetry. Franciso Umbral wrote a brilliant essay in his audacity in which he presents Federico García Lorca as a cursed poet. He gives a very precise definition of this type of artist: “An uprooted person, a downgraded person, a being who suffers from a self-destructive complex and who makes this complex and this self-destruction his work of art. »
The bourgeois public, still tinged with romanticism, loved the stories of lost people: drinking bohemians, geniuses broken by their own talent. Second prize (2024), by Isaki Lacuesta, reconstructs the universe of Los Planetas, a group whose true trajectory is marked by addictions, internal conflicts and self-destruction. Fernando Navarro, co-writer of the film, explains by telephone that what is truly romanticized in a cursed character are the remnants of tenderness that he still retains. “If he’s a self-destructive narcissist who acts like a jerk, the viewer will perceive him exactly that way.”
Navarro suggests that the curse, to exist, must always come from outside. You cannot be cursed by choice, nor by marketing. “To look for the elf, there is no map or drill,” Lorca explained. “The curse is nothing more than a disguise under which someone who has an injury hides,” adds the screenwriter. And he says that figure is selling for less today than ever. “Now everyone wants to be their own business. We have the feeling that capitalism has taken over everything: the image, self-promotion on the networks, the culture of care and health. There are artists who speak as if they were government delegates. I don’t know if this personal care is the same mask as the curse.”
The romanticization of madness
Before The planets was Rapture (1979), the last film of Iván Zulueta, a director who became a cursed figure in part because of his heroin addiction. It is a mysterious work, misunderstood at its premiere and which time has saved to the point that El País recently named it the best Spanish film of the last 50 years. But perhaps the most paradigmatic case is that of Leopoldo María Panero, son of the poet Leopoldo Panero and one of the protagonists of Disenchantment (Jaime Chavarri, 1976). He spent more than thirty years in a psychiatric hospital. Although one of his biographers, Benito Fernández, assured that he was truly sane, Panero himself wrote in a verse: “Madness was my Beatriz.”
This romanticization of madness clashes head-on with the current strong awareness around mental health. For decades, suffering and self-destruction have been interpreted almost as symptoms of genius. But in a generation that has reached adulthood accompanied by psychologists, mediations and various diagnoses, this myth has lost its force. Rosana Corbacho, psychologist specializing in musical artists, welcomes the fact that in recent years mental health problems in music have been talked about in a natural way, without resorting to morbidity. “There is a natural connection between mental health and artists, as many come from traumatic pasts and have used music to channel those feelings,” he explains.
The problem, Corbacho warns, is that an artist cannot rely on personal trauma or wounds to continue their career. If many do it, it is, in part, because the cliché of the tormented creator persists. “In the creative process this can serve as a specific moment of inspiration, but to develop sustained work it is better to be calm and in good mental condition.” The same thing happens with substance use: “The problem arises when creativity is associated with narcotics and the misconception that ‘I can only compose if I am blind’ is constructed.”
In recent years, the relationship between drugs and creativity has also changed. For decades there has been an almost automatic association between substance use and artistic inspiration: there are the experiences of the Beat generation – Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg – or, further back, the opiate reverie with which Coleridge wrote Kubla Khan. The idea that genius required crossing into dark, dangerous, or directly self-destructive areas has been replaced by the era of microdosing. Inspired by the gurus and billionaires of Silicon Valley, many creators today seek the spark without breaking their body: to produce the spark without paying the hangover. A calibrated and hygienic inspiration.
Trends change. What once seemed revolutionary now seems old. Dante Spinetta, son of the legendary Argentinian musician Luis Alberto Spinetta, sums it up in his dressing room before a concert: the most subversive thing now is not to do drugs. “I grew up in a rock and roll environment and I saw people lose everything to drugs. I said since I was a kid: ‘I don’t get involved in that shit.’ You don’t need external things to be able to flash and have ideas and realize this psychedelia too.
The unacceptable of the cursed
In recent years, highly visible mechanisms have been activated to report inappropriate or unacceptable behavior. Many cursed figures, so fascinating from the outside, turn out to be morally unstable or downright harmful to those around them. Fernando Savater claimed that, in real life, “the damned are generally unbearable.” Benito Fernández, Panero’s biographer, agrees. During his meetings with the poet, he admits, he almost waited with relief for the moment to take him back to the asylum. There’s Bukowski – hard to admire after watching him hit his wife live – or the more recent case of Cecilio G., whose videos, drugged and repeatedly arrested, show the less romantic side of what was previously read as rebellion.
As much as I love seeing these characters rehabilitated, the truth is that even they themselves don’t really believe in eating vegetables and getting up early to see the day. In one of the interviews that Sánchez Dragó carried out with Joaquín Sabina, the singer appeared rejuvenated, with beautiful colors and clear eyes. He had left everything after a serious health accident. The presenter celebrated her good condition, but Sabina, even knowing that this is what she must do, was clear: “I would change everything for a cigarette.”
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