"It's not so much wanting to die, but controlling that moment, choosing your own way"
About this Quote
Control is the last luxury in a life spent staging chaos. When GG Allin talks about “not so much wanting to die,” he’s undercutting the romantic myth of the doomed artist even as he leans into it. The line pivots from despair to agency: death isn’t the desire; authorship is. That’s a revealing distinction from someone whose career was built on transgression, self-destruction, and turning the body into a blunt instrument onstage.
The phrasing matters. “That moment” shrinks the whole question of mortality into a single beat you can seize, like grabbing the mic mid-brawl. “Choosing your own way” frames suicide less as surrender than as an exit strategy - a final refusal to be managed by doctors, laws, audiences, or fate. It’s punk’s libertarian streak pushed to its bleak endpoint: if everything else is compromised, at least the ending can be “pure.”
Context sharpens the menace. Allin performed violence as spectacle and treated shame as fuel; he sold authenticity through extremity. In that economy, talk of controlling death reads like brand consistency as much as confession. The subtext is a dare to the culture that consumes outlaw personas: you want the real thing? Then accept the cost. It also exposes the trap of that persona. When your art is built on pushing limits, the ultimate limit starts to look like the only move left that can’t be co-opted.
It’s a grim philosophy, but a coherent one: not an ode to death, a bid to keep ownership when everything else is slipping.
The phrasing matters. “That moment” shrinks the whole question of mortality into a single beat you can seize, like grabbing the mic mid-brawl. “Choosing your own way” frames suicide less as surrender than as an exit strategy - a final refusal to be managed by doctors, laws, audiences, or fate. It’s punk’s libertarian streak pushed to its bleak endpoint: if everything else is compromised, at least the ending can be “pure.”
Context sharpens the menace. Allin performed violence as spectacle and treated shame as fuel; he sold authenticity through extremity. In that economy, talk of controlling death reads like brand consistency as much as confession. The subtext is a dare to the culture that consumes outlaw personas: you want the real thing? Then accept the cost. It also exposes the trap of that persona. When your art is built on pushing limits, the ultimate limit starts to look like the only move left that can’t be co-opted.
It’s a grim philosophy, but a coherent one: not an ode to death, a bid to keep ownership when everything else is slipping.
Quote Details
| Topic | Free Will & Fate |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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