The Boy in the Band
by Jonathan Linder

With his neck-length blond-reddish hair and raw, understated-then-overinflated voice, Luke Helder was a dead ringer for Kurt Cobain. Even his disaffected lyrics echo Cobain's songs of angst and depravity. Now Helder's best friend from high school and former bandmate, a University of Wisconsin-Madison student, said Tuesday he's resigned to Helder leaving this world like his hero.

— The Capital Times, Madison, Wis., May 8

Here we go again.

Luke Helder, the 21-year old University of Wisconsin-Stout student who put pipe bombs in rural mailboxes across the Midwest, was a nice kid from Minnesota who had a punk band and idolized Kurt Cobain.

Soon after it became known who the pipe bomber was, media reports circulated with a plethora of simplistic biographical information — there were interviews with peers and advisors at Stout, friends and family in Minnesota and an ex-girlfriend now attending UW-Madison. There were the notes Helder left with the pipe bombs, and quotes from his band’s lyrics and his website. The media painted a picture, Bob Ross style, of the boy next door who somehow went awry. Plenty of allusions to Helder's psyche, though no disclaimers from, say, a mental health professional on how best to interpret these incomplete sketches of an individual.

As tends to happen when something tragic, or potentially tragic, occurs, the media quickly went from informative to trite to sometimes counterproductive, feeding into the very real human desire to know and understand, albeit by turning everyone into an armchair psychologist.

And of course, music was to blame. Music was blamed for the Columbine massacre; it has been blamed for suicides and uncountable murders — so why not draw the same connection to Luke Helder?

We create a split image. The boy who couldn’t, with the dark side of him that could. Everyone likes a good story, and what better story than that of the good American boy gone bad, the young man who became too involved in punk and grunge, became paranoid of the government and willing to paint a smiley face of bombs. We create an image that reeks of sensationalism.

Armchair psychology is a grand game, but it is just a game, and the wanton desire to feign understanding is counterproductive, even disastrous. When the news media paint a gaudy, sensationalized portrait of a tragic event, attention seekers are always willing to keep the story going. Copycats may follow. If they do, will his or her own life merge readily into the now-established storyline? Perhaps he or she also will have played in a punk band. Perhaps, we might hear, what with all these punk-playing pipe-bombers, we have an endemic problem on our hands.

Yes, we do have an endemic problem on our hands, but it has nothing to do with music; rather, it has everything to do with sensationalism.

So Helder idolized Cobain. So did tens of millions of other young adults who were impressionable teenagers when that fabled musician killed himself. I'm fairly certain that most Nirvana-fans-turned-punk-rockers have not stuck bombs in people's mailboxes. Oh, but Helder's band was named Apathy. Surely that must be a sign? But anyone who has paid attention to popular music in the past, say, 40 years would hear more angst than happiness. While Helder's life is more complex than an idyllic beginning and a tragic end, the reality of life's complexities is somehow not worth the time. We want the sensational, and we want it now.

Cobain's life is a case in point. A great musician whose songs dripped with the depression he apparently felt, Cobain became the ultimate tragic character to his fans. His death was nearly celebrated. His life became a fable, he became a legend and Nirvana's popularity soared. Had Cobain's death not been treated so sensationally, Nirvana might not have had the same popular culture staying power.

Now another legend is being crafted before our eyes. Luke Helder, the nice young man who let his Apathy control him. Luke Helder, the man who set out to get the government's attention with Nirvana ringing in his ears. I can see the made-for-TV movie now. A trite focus on punk rock, grunge and the twisting of a young man's life. As if it were that simple: a nice man, or a grunge rocker.

There is a subtle ignorance in this version of Helder. We always want to know; we always want to understand. Life is easier that way, but the solutions have less meaning. More than anything, we like a nice story, formulaic enough so we can consider Helder's social transgression a closed case, gaudy enough so we can remain riveted, and from our armchair draw our own conclusions.

E-mail Jonathan Linder at jglinder at yahoo dot com.