""Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" is as good an epitaph for the counterculture as any; we'll never know how-or if-Janis meant to go on from there. Janis Joplin's death, like that of a fighter in the ring, was not exactly an accident. Yet it's too easy to label it either suicide or murder, though it involved elements of both. Call it rather an inherent risk of the game she was playing, a game whose often frivolous rules both hid and revealed a deadly serious struggle. The form that struggle took was incomplete, shortsighted, egotistical, self-destructive. But survivors who give in to the temptation to feel superior to all that are in the end no better than those who romanticize it. Janis was not so much a victim as a casualty. The difference matters."
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Rock singersAmerican country singersSinger-songwriters from the United StatesFolk singersBlues singers
Original Language: English
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Sources
Ellen Willis 1976 article in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Janis_Joplin
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Janis Joplin
Janis Lyn Joplin (19 January 1943 – 4 October 1970) was an American singer and songwriter.
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