Death Of (Another) Rock Star

 

 

It's pretty damn obvious that our mortality is now deliberately trying to piss us off.

When we were younger, the only things that killed rock stars were plane crashes and drug overdoses.  Sure, there was the occasional violent death (like Sam Cooke, or Bobby Fuller), and Cass Elliot, Bobby Darin, and King Elvis I were indeed betrayed by their own failing bodies.  But rock stars generally didn't die from natural causes.  Natural causes only killed old people.  And rock stars would die before they got old.

Except that they didn't die before they got old, and neither did we.  We've lived long enough to regret the stupid notion of ever hoping to die before we got old.  Live fast?  Die young?  Screw that.  If we weren't just dumbass kids, we would have realized that a lot sooner.

So, we aged.  Our rock stars got old, too.  With each passing year, we lose more and more of our musical heroes, whether from the results of decades of hard livin', or just from the built-in obsolescence of us fragile little human beings. We break pretty easily.  Our shelf life is finite.

We have been reminded of that fact a lot lately.

The first such reminder to really hit me was the death of Joey Ramone, way back in 2001.  The Ramones were so important to me, and losing a Ramone to cancer was a tough thing to accept.  We also lost George Harrison that same year.  As years go by, the list of beloved pop icons taken by the Grim Reaper, and dead by means other than a bullet, a needle, or a plummeting aircraft, has grown numbingly, devastatingly vast:  Ray Charles. Johnny Cash. Wilson Pickett.  Alex Chilton. Michael Jackson. Solomon Burke. Lou Reed.  Lesley Gore.  ALL of the original Ramones.  Lemmy. David Bowie. Glenn Frey.

Music and art play such vital roles in our everyday lives.  When a performer we love dies, we feel a personal loss, even though it's just the death of a famous person we never actually met.  Those who ridicule us for feeling the loss are...what's the word?  Oh yeah:  they're assholes.  Because these artists and performers were a very real part of our lives.  Their lives and their work mattered to us; of course we feel bad when they're gone.

Why do we mourn David Bowie, or Glenn Frey?  I guess part of it does relate to the hardening certainty of our own sand slipping to the bottom of the hourglass, but it's too facile and glib to conclude that's the whole of it.  The largest part of it, I think, is just the knowledge that another cherished part of our lives has been taken away from us. Once again, we've been unable to hold on. We will fall, we will all fall, we will fall.

That hurts.  Every time.  2016 has already warned us that we had damned well better get used to it.