All your favorite musicians do a shitload of drugs. The Beatles, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Prince… if you can name a song by someone, no matter how squeaky clean their image, they probably do drugs.
Formerly-popular-before-BTS-came-along boy band One Direction is no exception. This is really no surprise, since they always sort of modeled themselves as the “bad boys” of shitty bands that give high school girls the horn. But in a Rolling Stone profile, Harry Styles told a genuinely interesting story about biting part of his tongue off while on drugs in the studio recording his upcoming album.
Psychedelics have started to play a key role in his creative process. “We’d do mushrooms, lie down on the grass, and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram in the sunshine,” he says. “We’d just turn the speakers into the yard.” The chocolate edibles were kept in the studio fridge, right next to the blender. “You’d hear the blender going, and think, ‘So we’re all having frozen margaritas at 10 a.m. this morning.’” He points to a corner: “This is where I was standing when we were doing mushrooms and I bit off the tip of my tongue. So I was trying to sing with all this blood gushing out of my mouth. So many fond memories, this place.”
I mean, it’s just a studio session, not a live show, so he’s no Dock Ellis, but it’s still a pretty interesting story.
But again, all your favorite musicians do drugs. Not naming any names, but if you’re in the most popular band in the world and your concerts smell like pee because your teenaged fans are so excited they piss themselves and people are cutting themselves because you took a week off… you’re probably doing drugs to deal with that pressure, no matter how squeaky clean your carefully controlled image is or how many suits you wear on Ed Sullivan.