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American Head Charge Singer Discusses Fentanyl Addiction in Interview.
In a raw, unflinching 45-minute interview that feels more like a forgotten B-side than a polished single, Cameron Heacock, the former frontman of Minneapolis nu-metal outfit American Head Charge, has resurfaced after seven years of radio silence. The platform is the poignant YouTube channel *Soft White Underbelly*, a digital archive dedicated to giving a voice to society's most overlooked—the unhoused, the chronic drug user, the invisible.Here, Heacock isn't the chaotic performer who once shared stages with Ozzfest giants; he is a man laid bare, living on the unforgiving streets of Los Angeles and locked in a daily battle with a fentanyl addiction that has become the defining track of his current life. This isn't a comeback story set to a triumphant guitar riff; it's a haunting, acoustic ballad of survival.American Head Charge, for those who remember the turn-of-the-millennium metal scene, was a force of nature from Minnesota, a band that distilled industrial aggression and melodic anguish into their critically acclaimed 2001 debut, *The War of Art*. They were contenders, their sound a perfect storm for an era defined by bands like Slipknot and Static-X.But the very turbulence that fueled their music often spilled into life offstage, with Heacock's struggles becoming an open secret within the industry. To hear him now, discussing the harrowing specifics of fentanyl—a synthetic opioid up to 100 times more potent than morphine that has fundamentally reshaped America's opioid crisis—is to witness a tragedy in its third act.The interview is less a discussion and more a testimony, a stark contrast to the glamorized rock-and-roll excess of the past. Fentanyl is a different beast entirely; it’s not the poetic decline of a bluesman but a clinical, efficient, and brutally democratic killer.It’s the substance that has turned city sidewalks into open-air wards and has made carrying naloxone a necessary part of many people's daily lives. Heacock’s narrative forces us to listen to the feedback loop between personal trauma and a systemic failure—a lack of accessible mental health care, the scarcity of long-term rehabilitation programs that don't require celebrity-level funding, and the sheer difficulty of finding stable housing after the spotlight fades. His story is a single, powerful verse in a much larger, ongoing song of national crisis, one that echoes from the dive bars of Minneapolis to the sun-bleached streets of LA, a grim reminder that the war of art has, for too many, become a war for life itself.
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#American Head Charge
#Cameron Heacock
#fentanyl addiction
#homelessness
#Soft White Underbelly
#interview
#nu-metal
