SDMB member pennylane uses this as a signature line after posting on the boards. A roommate i lived with back in Australia also “cried a river of tears for Buckley.”
What i’d like to know is how many people out there share similar feelings of ridiculous maudlin sentimentality for rich, famous people who they never knew? I mean, come on, you bought his CDs and probably went to his concerts, helping to contribute to what was probably an extremely luxurious lifestyle. Do you owe him your grief as well?
This post may belong at IMHO or in the BBQ pit, as it might seem like a bit of a rant. But i don’t think so. What i’m asking here is about the cult of celebrity and how so many people seem to spend so much of their time and effort worrying about the intimate details of the lives of people who they will never meet, and who, in many cases, probably wouldn’t give them the time of day.
I should add at the end that i’m a big fan of Buckley’s work, and that his death probably deprived us of more really fantastic music. But waste time crying about it? I don’t think so.
Sorry, DuckDuckGoose, i should have been more specific. It’s Jeff Buckley, a recording artist (his work appears on CDs entitled Grace and Songs for My Sweetheart the Drunk) who drowned a couple of years back in the Mississippi River. At least i assume that’s who pennylane is referring to.
I don’t know anything about Buckly, and I don’t generally get very worked up over any artist/actor/famous person dying.
My personal view is this:
I can say that I grew up listening to Billy Joel music. It spoke to me as a child, I grew up with it as a teen, and it helped me through hard times just knowing that someone else had felt my feelings and had the courage to write about them. I also loved the imagry many other songs evoked, and his music has provided me with years of comfort and enjoyment. If he died tomorrow, I would likely be personally affected by that death. I imagine I would weep for the loss of a person who impacted my life greatly (whether he meant to or not), and I would be sad to see someone who made such an impact on me suddenly gone. I would likely find the world a little colder place for the loss.
Is that stupid or ridiculous? Possibly. Each persons sense of loss is different. Millions of people remember exactly where they were when JFK died. Why? They didn’t know him personally. Same for Princess Diana. I suspect that their death symbolizes a deeper loss for the mourner. Perhaps they were a role model. In any case, I don’t think it’s unusual to mourn for someone you do not know when they die. If it’s a loss to someone, it’s a loss no matter what the reason is.
Well, I’m constantly amazed at how people feel they have a right to critique who or what people grieve. Maybe not You necessarily, but like in the Aaliyah Died thread, people popped in and said “Who was she and why do we care?” If you don’t know or care, don’t open the thread where people who did know and do care are sad.
No one requires that we all grieve for the same people in the same ways. If Rammstein went down in a plane crash tomorrow, I’d be inconsolable for days, maybe weeks, mainly because their music is such a huge part of my daily life, I know they have wives and children who would be crushed, and I’ve met them personally, but really, I don’t care how you feel about it. Grief is a personal thing that others can’t dictate, famous or not. Whether you think someone deserves my tears makes no difference to me, because I"M the one being sad and in the most simple of terms:
since i’m only a young whippersnapper i’ll give you my 2 cents.
almost everyone i know under 25 owns a copy of GRACE. most of them bought it after he died (i bought it because it was part of a 5 CDs for £20 deal) because we’re that young. and we like the voice. and when you talk about jeff buckley you mean the VOICE.
sad because he died? yes.
pity i’ll never see him live in concert? yes.
would i begrudge a man with such a vocal talent from his cut of the ticket money? no.
not the way i’d begrudge some talentless manufactured group.
I’ve been as guilty as anyone in the past of mocking the Princess Di mourners or others in similar situations, but I know I will get my just desserts, and be in the same boat they were, the day Paul McCartney dies.
Famous dead guys I have mourned:[ul][li]Jim Henson[/li][li]Douglas Adams[/li][li]Richard Feynman[/li]Peter McWilliams[/ul]WallyM7 and John Guarnieri don’t qualify as “famous.”
Your post doesn’t address my question, as Zette has pointed out. I’m a big Jeff Buckley fan (Grace is playing on the stereo is i write this), i regret that i won’t be able to see him in concert, and i don’t begrudge him (or his estate now) his share of royalties from the CDs of his that i have bought. Despite all this, i still don’t understand the way that people over-sentimentalise their own connections to the rich and famous.
I suppose what i am trying to say here is that i believe that there is some qualititaive difference between recognising the importance of someone’s contribution to human existence and the unfortunate fact of their demise on the one hand, and the tendency of some people to invest an excessive amount of emotional energy in people they don’t know. Especially when, in my experience, some of these same people seem unable to muster up the same level of empathy for people who struggle every day of their lives against poverty, oppression etc.
I agree that the world loses something when these people die - i am especially in agreement with tracer’s listing of Feynman and Adams - but at least the rich and famous have gained considerable personal rewards and social kudos for their contributions to society, unlike many others that i can think of, such as teachers or nurses (notice how the most undervalued groups in society are often those where women predominate?).
To inject a more personal note into the debate, if i were to nominate a personal ‘hero’ (i hate the term, but there you go) it would be American linguist and political critic Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is over 70 years old, and (barring my death in a car accident etc.) will certainly die before i do. When that happens i will regret that he will no longer be able to contribute, and that we will have lost an intellectual giant and a passionate political advocate. But despite the impact his writings have had on me, i will feel no sense of loss on the personal level in the way that i would if, say, a friend or family member died. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t feel some sadness at these events - as i thnk my OP made clear - only that the over-investment displayed by many is symptomatic of an unhealty cult of personality in modern society.
Just thoughts
It just so happened that one of the best local radio stations around Chicago (XRT) played a two hour tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughn on the anniversery of his death.
What Rammstein is to Jarbabyj, is what Stevie is to me.
I saw every one of his shows starting way back in 1985 at the Aragon ‘Brawlroom’ were there are NO seats to shows at Holiday Star and Alpine Valley. I saw him while there was still a Poplar Creek. When I went to a Stevie concert, there I never had to spend money on beer. I would dance the entire time (not very well mind you, but who cares)usually leaving looking like I just went to the gym. Bottom Line-I LOVE HIM I don’t care that he’s dead, I still love him.
Getting back to my point, I tuned in to the two hour event for about 5 seconds. They were playing a concert recorded live and I tuned in just in time to hear him speak between songs about how happy he was to be there and thanking everyone. I burst into tears and changed the station.
Just a little Miss Creant trivia, that is now stuck in your brain cells forever.
No offence, Miss Creant, but the fact that people “love” and “burst into tears” for stars like Stevie Ray Vaughan is not at issue here. The fact that this happens was the very impetus for my OP. In that post, i put forward my thoughts on the issue in an attempt to find out why this is the case.
What is it that people feel they are losing when someone like this dies? You’re not losing a friend, unless you happened to know the person (which is a totally different thing). You’re not losing their music, because presumably you have all or most of the CDs, records, or whatever. Sure, you lose the opportunity to go to some concerts, but is that worth the waterworks? And, as i have already conceded, the world is deprived of their possible future productions, but the attachment you can have to something that doesn’t even exist yet can surely only be at the level of being sad about lost potential. Who knows, maybe some of these people would have been like Saturday Night Live, declining as they age and living largely on the kudos of their halcyon days.
In sum, despite the irascible comments i made in the OP, i am interested in what people feel about this. I don’t deny your feelings, i’d just like to know where they are coming from. And no-one yet, with the exception of Zette and the partial exception of jarbabyj, has really addressed this issue.
Umm… my signature is just a quote from the TV show “King of the Hill”. A character called Kahn says he cried a river of tears for Buckley. I liked Buckley but I don’t shed tears for animated TV show characters…
I’d argue that it depends on a persons particular feelings for an artist. There’s probably no rational reason behind it, but I do feel a certain affection for some of my favourite musicians, and writers for that matter. I’d have no logical reason to feel sad for their passing, but I would anyway.
Then again, is there ever a good logical reason for feeling sad when anyone dies? Hell, it’s coming to us all, why does it upset us. To reuse your arguments, a persons death does not take away our memories of them or the times we shared. You might be deprived of possible future times with them, but the same argument applies as to how much value can be attached to potential?
It appears i misinterpreted your tagline. Many apologies. But i think the question was worth asking anyway.
To Gary Kumquat
I take your point, but would still posit that there is, or at least there is for me, some important qualitative difference between a person who i spend much of my time with on a day to day basis, and whose death would dramatically alter my normal existence, and someone whose demise would do little more than reduce my future book- or CD-buying potential.
Maybe i should also add a caveat. All this would seem to be most relevant when the person’s death is considered premature. i.e the death of Jeff Buckley or Stevie Ray Vaughan, and, as a hypothetical example, the death of one’s sibling or best friend in a car accident. It seems to me that someone’s death from old age generally finds us better prepared to accept it.
To put it plainly, I would weep for a dead artist that I admired simply because they had been an integral part of my life for so long and now they no longer would be, just like a pet or a relative or whatever.
I listen to rammstein every day. I play them in my car, I travel 3000 miles to see them, I am hopelessly addicted.
If one day I woke up and they were gone, it would cause major changes in my life, stupid as that may seem to everyone else.
After all, even when we mourn a close relative, we’re only crying for ourselves. I think it was Mark Twain who said, “Why do we cry at funerals and laugh at weddings? Is it because we are not the person concerned?”