Perhaps music isn’t as important to you it is to some people. For me, music is the single most important thing that isn’t another actual living being. Many songs are locked into my brain the way that smells are locked in for other people: a single riff, a few notes from a melody, a particular rhythm, sometimes even a single sound can trigger memories of things that would otherwise remain hidden, buried under decades of experiences.
Some of the people who created that music I got personally invested in, because their art brought me so much pleasure; for some it became a self-reinforcing loop of positive associations. And for a very small handful, as I learned more about them, the way they look at the world became influential in how I look at the world, how I experience life. I not only want to create as they do, to some degree I want to experience things as they do so that perhaps I can create as they do. I don’t want to be them, but I want to be like them, because I admire them and their work. When that influence is removed from the world in what seems to be an untimely manner, the absence of their presence is nearly as profound as losing someone I actually know.
When D. Boon was killed at 27 years old back in 1985, I was crushed. His outlook on life, his steadfast friendship with Mike Watt, his inventiveness, his intensity, his zeal, his singular perspective on the world… all gone in an instant, never to be heard again except as something that had already been.
Frank Zappa was the reason I began playing guitar. I admired his music and as I got to know more about him, I found a lot to admire in his views on the world, his sense of responsibility, his defense of the right of people to express themselves and his joy in creating and performing. When he passed away in 1993 at just 52 years old, I was also crushed. Again, his singular perspective was gone from the world, except as something that had already happened; I would never again experience the joy of hearing something that he had just created and was proud enough of to share with the world.
I didn’t curl up into a ball and withdraw for days on end in either case, mind you, but their deaths and many others have affected my life because, as John Donne wrote, I am involved in mankind and so every man’s death diminishes me (some more than others, naturally).
I’ve come to accept that this is how things are: someday, I too will die and if I’ve lived a good life, been part of other’s people’s lives, either in person or thru my art and been a positive influence and experience, my death will affect them too. They may feel the same selfish regret that I am gone that I have felt so many times when others have passed away; hopefully they will also feel some joy that I was there at all, tho.
Also, sometimes the fictional death of a fictional character, or the expression of loss or regret can make me sad. To this day I have a difficult time listening to Seasons In The Sun or Cat’s In The Cradle, for instance; they just hit their mark too well for me. I recently brought up in another thread that there is a passage in Philip Pullman’s A Subtle Knife that tears me up just thinking about it.
I don’t know if my explanation of why I feel really sad about the death of someone I don’t know personally is all that eloquent, but there it is.
I remember when the Beatles first came on the scene. I remember the Fab Four days, the Sgt. Pepper period and when the band was breaking apart. I was shocked when John was killed. I shed a few tears when George died. When Paul and Ringo eventually go, I’ll be just as sad because they represented my youth, which at first gently trailed behind me, but which is now accelerating away faster and faster.