The recording artist Prince died last week. You might have heard about it. Incessantly, that is. Because the press has lost its mind over his death. One would have thought the Second Coming had occurred, only in reverse. The attention being paid to his departure is beyond ridiculous.
Prince was a very good recording artist. He was, by all accounts, a great showman. Women loved the diminutive star's freakishness. That women found him attractive at all boggled my mind, but sex appeal, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I truly liked his music. He was a great, great artist.
But that's all he was. He didn't cure cancer. He didn't bring peace to the Middle East. He didn't put an end to AIDS. He wrote and sang songs. He put entertained. To hear the media tell it, though, he wrote the soundtrack to our lives. Generations molded their collective existences to his music.
Already, there have been retrospectives on his Super Bowl show in the rain, a collection of his Saturday Night Live appearances and countless reminders of what a prolific songwriter he was, citing the hits he wrote for Sinead O'Conner, the Bangles and Chaka Khan. His life is being examined and repackaged so that we understand the depth of his impact on society.
It's balderdash. The man wrote and performed music. I can understand his family and close friends being distraught at his passing, but the notion that some people can't imagine a world without him in it is senseless. How many of these fans actually knew the man? How many of them can say they exchanged more than a few words with him?
From media reports, Prince actually seemed like a very generous person. He was a gentle soul, a genuinely nice person. Fine. The world's lost another generous, gentile, genuinely nice person. Here's a news flash: The world loses people like that by the thousands every single day. Most of those who die aren't celebrities whose work is as public as Prince's is. Their lives value as much as his does, but because of his celebrity, his death is magnified beyond reason.
That people flock to Paisley Park and put notes and flowers and stuffed animals in the fence surrounding the compound is just plain stupid. First of all, the man's dead, people. He can't read the notes anymore, smell the flowers anymore or even cuddle the stuffed animals anymore. And if one believes in the afterlife, Prince can tell all about this without the physical reminders stuck in his fence.
When Michael Jackson died, we saw the same gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and lamentations about how life just wasn't worth living. Perhaps a few misguided souls took their lives, but that was their choice. The sun still came up in the east, set in the west and allowed life to go on. The same is happening now despite Prince's departure. And it will happen again after Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars die, whether their deaths are suddenly tragic or sadly expected.
Too often celebrities are inflated to have importance far beyond what it should be. By no means do I mean to diminish Prince's contributions to popular culture. But perspective is sorely lacking yet again.
(As an aside, Billy Paul, who sang Me and Mrs. Jones, died over the weekend. Lonnie Mack died the same day as Prince did. It's been a hellish year on the music industry. I don't recall a year in which so many notable members of the same industry have died.)
(c) 2016 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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