The Story of Arrested Youth: The musician whose art was transformed by a brain condition
In the 1980s – an age of great mores – there was a famous psychological study. A couple of times per week, a class of four-year-olds were allowed to do what they wanted for an hour or so. Those who wanted to paint, pained; those who wanted to play football, played football; those who just wanted to think, flicked snots into the sandpit; and the masses who mulled about unsure, flitted between stations.
Meanwhile, the adults just quietly observed. It goes without saying that the adults noticed some of the painters were pathetic, some of the footballers were more likely to score an own goal than a screamer, and some of the thinkers were clearly producing more bogies than they were barnstorming thoughts. But that mattered not—they were doing what they wanted.
Until suddenly, it did matter. The free-for-all continued with one minor change. Rather than being passive observers of the expressive melee, the adults would step in and offer rewards to the children who excelled in what they were doing. Almost instantly, the big kids put down their easels and flocked to the playing field, those plodding away in the music room without hitting a single note, put away their Bontempi and plied their craft at more boring competencies, those who had been flitting now fixated on their ‘strength’.
And a message about mankind resounded: conspiracy theories needn’t worry, the greatest form of control is a simple, deeply human, rewards system.
By and large, we do what we are told we are good at; then, we are rewarded in turn. That sounds like a simple enough way to frame the modern constitution of humanity, but it masks a multitude of complex nuances and contradictions. Our psyche is often mingled with the capitalist framework it exists within, making it hard to unpick the web. We find hints of answers and solutions to these mysteries of the human mind and the ways of the world in the story of Ian Johnson, a musician who goes by the moniker Arrested Youth.
Creating music in chronic pain
One day, while on tour, he leapt in the air from on top of a large amplifier. When he landed – like a staggering 20.9% of adults in the US – it seemed a life of living with chronic pain awaited him. He had suffered from niggling shoulder pains for years, but this was different. “I felt this shot go through my arm and radiate through my whole body,” Johnson explains. “It was almost like I had touched an electric fence.” He was perturbed by this jolt of agony but powered on through the show all the same.
The rigours of the road are a constant reality for performing musicians, and he was prepared to put this searing incident to the back of his mind. So, the next day, he casually wandered out of a nondescript East Coast hotel in a location he can’t even recall. However, the suburban stretch of road he soon found himself jogging along will remain fixed in his mind forevermore. “I was running down this hill. There was a lot of gravity impact on my body, and I started to feel like someone was shoving knives into my forearms. The pain was that intense like my nerves were firing all of a sudden,” he soberly recalls.
The intensity of the pain was such that he could no longer ignore it, but recognition of the problem was just the beginning. He flew back to New York, got an MRI scan, and the source of four years of pain became apparent. He had Chiari Malformation Type I. As he simply puts it, “The base of my brain was pushing down into my spinal canal.” He was lucky. Roseanne Cash, the singer-songwriter and daughter of Johnny Cash, suffered from the same condition, though hers would take a lot longer to detect. In both circumstances, their art transformed wildly as a result.
Dr Concetta Tomaino argues the solution is a scientifically self-explanatory one. “Any artist who’s been faced with the dilemma of ‘Is this the end of my creativity? Is this the end of my life’? And then gets it back to some degree, obviously it’s going to influence their art in a very dramatic way, maybe free them up, to take more risk, to not conform as much,” she explains. As an expert in music and the mind, she’s heard stories like the one I told her about Ian Johnston many times before.
Sadly, this ‘dilemma’ lingers beyond the diagnosis—the diagnosis doesn’t put a stop to the chronic pain. In fact, Johnson argues it might even amplify it. From the first shoulder pangs to a clean bill of health was a six-year process. The last year of which involved recovery from the surgery itself. He was sliced open from the top of his skull to the base of his neck, and the operating area was the nausea centre. “It’s the migraine centre of the body,” he explains. “So, my recovery was a lot of migraines, a lot of cerebral pain for a long time.”
The symptom that he wasn’t prepared for was the impact all of this would have on his music. The sound he had honed as Arrested Youth was an urban affair—the brand your mother might blanket label as rap. Suddenly, this felt foreign to Johnson. “I’d been wanting to evolve my sound for a long time. Like many artists, I was looking for a more organic sound, a more poised sound. This experience put the pressure off that,” he explains.
“This experience gave me a chance to really go for it. I didn’t have that fear I had had over the last six years of my career. A fear of, ‘Am I going to make something that works; are people going to like it’. I wanted to make something that feels great to me because I was struggling so much at that time that the music really became about healing myself.”
So, his switch from rap to heartland rock was not because his brain had been fundamentally altered in a physical way – although Dr Tomaino explains that she has had patients that completely change their music taste following frontal lobe injuries – but rather than he wanted to pursue something he felt he should have been doing all along. With the cerebellum so heavily linked to rhythm perception, there could of also potentially been a literal change, but the psychological impact was starkly self-evident.
This creative liberation arrived at the confluence of two separate sources of impetus: a stark recognition of mortality and a new lease of life. “Here’s the thing you have to ask yourself: are you doing what people like, and that’s the music you’re making? Are you happy doing it?” he asks. “Because if you’re happy doing it, then do it. I wasn’t happy making what the people wanted. So, then you ask yourself, well, am I in this for a job, or am I in this for the art?”
In the modern music industry, where cash is increasingly hard to come by, this is an even more profound predicament. It stretches the psychological awakening of chasing your dreams to its furthest extreme. You see, to some extent, an extent that was even lost on Johnson during our chat, he was already living his dream of being a musician—it is just that he found the music itself suddenly unfulfilling.
The genre you find yourself applying your craft to can often fall into place purely by happenstance. Take, for instance, the comically named Joe and The Shitboys. This punk band are from the Faroe Islands, a place of around 50,000 people, where musicians will frequently be in ten different bands and extoll distinctly different genres every day of the week to keep the scene alive. So, in a recent chat with the group, they explained that they played folk, avant-garde electronica, metal, ambient music and everything in between before a punk jam among friends suddenly took off, and now that is how they ply their trade permanently.
So, it’s not that Johnson was being wilfully insincere by going down a commercially successful route to start off with; it is just that sometimes rewards decree your direction. Boldly, as he battled through recovery, something psychologically happened that stopped him from chasing these rewards.
“Lots of people who survive a traumatic experience, especially artists, do have this kind of transformative revelation of meaning and purpose and focusing on themselves more or focusing on their needs rather than conforming,” Dr Tomaino added. For Johnson, he not only found a new outlook on life through his art, but he found pursuing that actually helped with his healing process. He was in the studio, and he had a purpose that eased the burden of his pain.
“When you go through something like this, you start to wonder, ‘Well, what happens if this is my last album? What happens if I don’t wake?’ When you go through something that big, it shows you how fragile life is,” Johnson explains. And you start to say, well, what am I? What am I waiting for? You start to say, ‘Well, what am I waiting for? Do I want to be creatively miserable, making what I feel is not my best work for commercial purposes? Or do I want to really stick my neck out there and make something I think is great and see how it does.”
Even his mere absence from the industry rammed this point home. When he returned after years of recovery, he noticed that artists were being forced to ram their music down people’s throats. He opted out of that, too.
The album, Too Late to Start Over, even purposefully makes this point clear. There is no Brat summer or internetification of culture in sight, his focus is on nature and getting “away from the hustle and bustle”. Even for the sound, he stripped things back to a level of honest “simplicity”. But this is not Johnson necessarily thumbing his noses at the changes in the industry, it is simply a bid to explore a new sound he enjoyed.
“I always say, this job, being an artist, is so taxing in so many ways that the very minimum that you should get out of it is creative fulfilment. And if you’re not getting that, why do it?” This line of thinking came as a revelation not limited to his own outlook but how he viewed the industry as a whole. “Music is a very romanticised industry. Everyone thinks everyone’s in it for the same reasons. But when you pull back the curtain, you realise everyone has very different intentions and very different reasons for staying in music as artists. I think we’ve kind of dumbed down that approach. I think a lot of artists are very good at saying what they think people want to hear.”
“The truth is, artists are cheeky bastards, and they’ll find a little storyline that works for them, and they think the world wants to hear,” he honestly adds. “I think artists, as a collective, follow the trend and say what we think people want to hear more than almost any other job title now. And that’s interesting to me. Because then what’s an artist, you know? So, I thought the whole point of the artist was to ruffle feathers. And I think now we ruffle the feathers in a very surface-level way, we ruffle the feathers visually, or we create an aura that we’re ruffling feathers, but the intellect behind it, there’s no ruffling. It’s really just selling what’s working.”
He admits that this alone is something he probably wouldn’t have said a few years back, proving that brain condition has changed the whole gamut of how he sees music and his place in it. Beyond the stark genre switch, there are implications within his tale of how the mind itself even sits within the society around it. As for where Too Late to Start Over sits within that same framework, Johnson comments: “It’s my hope, and I’m very confident in saying it, that I think an album like this will be a great friend to like people who are going through very momentous barriers or obstacles in their life.”
