MAGGIE ESTEP, REST IN PEACE!

We lost a lot of great people this past month alone, such as Bunny Rugs from Third World, Shirley Temple, Philip Seymour Hoffman and just yesterday Sid Ceasar. Also yesterday, a powerful…and we mean POWERFUL…spoken-word artist that took advantage of the 90’s counterculture scene going mainstream and made us all better off for it.

A.V. Club

The New York blog East Village Grieve is reporting the death of Maggie Estep, a poet, novelist, and spoken-word performance artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, at a time when her hip, confrontational attitude fit right in with the burgeoning “alternative” scene. Estep died of a heart attack at the age of 50. The A.V. Club has reached out to her representatives for official confirmation; meanwhile, tributes from those who knew her continue to pour in on Twitter.

Like other spoken-word artists of the grunge era such as King Missile (and even Henry Rollins, if you like), Maggie Estep married her aggressive, sardonic verse to rock music, on albums such as 1994’s No More Mister Nice Girl. Tracks like “I’m Not A Normal Girl” and “The Stupid Jerk I’m Obsessed With” found Estep embracing her own neuroses and taking aim at boringly conventional idiots—two of the guiding philosophies of Generation X. 

In an age where anything “counterculture” was readily snapped up, Estep’s angsty coffeehouse rants and Lower East Side cool made her a regular presence on MTV, which featured her on Spoken Word Unplugged (the kind of MTV show concept that now seems like a lifetime ago), and sent her out on the “Free Your Mind” tour with fellow slam poets John S. Hall (of King Missile) and Reg E. Gaines. Estep’s video for “Hey Baby” even turned up on Beavis And Butt-head, where she arguably broke through to her widest audience. Her MTV fame helped her land slots on the Lollapalooza and Woodstock festivals in 1994, and garnered her a glowing profile in the New York Times.