It's weird when they die, isn't it?
I mean, even if you're just a casual fan, even if you just have the Greatest Hits album, even if you have not checked in to listen to anything that artist has produced since back when your mind was fresh and pliable, there's that moment when you hear that an artist is gone and you get that little taste of impermanence.
Your relationship with the music hasn't changed. It's just that the world is a little different because a musician you've never met is dead and now you can examine what your life would have looked, smelled and tasted like if they had never existed.
Bowie was kind of like that for me. And Lou Reed. And Prince...
I really only let two of Prince's albums into my head, but they infiltrated so deeply that it's hard to imagine my adolescence without them.
Maybe the fairest measure of Prince's talent is the fact that he permeated my peer group. He drew the fandom of a car full of mid-80's middle-America white-bread homophobic teenage dudes who, previously united in their open and gleeful mockery of Michael Jackson, would inevitably memorize with digital clarity every wavelength of every sound of every note of every song on the Purple Rain Soundtrack album.
On its surface, Prince's music seems to simply be about wanting to bone every living thing. But it's richness and complexity merits closer examination, whereupon it becomes clear that his true obsession is the role of the disenfranchised, the search for self-identification and the creation of art within the construct of wanting to bone every living thing.
If the combination of unfocused sexual energy and overwhelming self-doubt was a sound, it would be the sound of the wavering, buzzing synths at the end of "Automatic" from 1999, the notes that sustain after the rhythm tracks end. And if it's been a while, or if you've never had the experience of being, an American suburban teenager, find that sound, loop it, max it out your earbuds and then YOU sit in a painted cinder block room and try to learn trigonometry. Best of luck.
Everything above this point was typed and ready to post by Saturday. The next morning, I had a look at Twitter and saw someone offering their condolences to Patton Oswalt, whose Netflix special I had watched on Friday night, whose wife changed the way I felt about True Crime writing, whose wife was the guest on the only podcast out of maybe ten thousand that I've listened to where I immediately listened to the entire episode a second time, whose wife had been the topic of three conversations I had heard during the previous week, whose wife's amateur investigation into cold case homicides was so strangely productive that it made me wonder if maybe all of society's problems could be fixed by compulsive civilians, and whose wife, Michelle McNamara, 46, did not wake up on Thursday.
Where Prince's death opened a wistful revisitation to some old music I hadn't thought about in a while, the news of McNamara dying drew a gasp out of me and bummed out the rest of my day. She was 46. She and Oswalt have a seven year old daughter. The Golden State Killer is probably still alive. The last thing she tweeted about was this stupid election. Good and smart people don't always wake up.
I didn't know and wouldn't have ever met these people. It's just weird when they die.
I mean, even if you're just a casual fan, even if you just have the Greatest Hits album, even if you have not checked in to listen to anything that artist has produced since back when your mind was fresh and pliable, there's that moment when you hear that an artist is gone and you get that little taste of impermanence.
Your relationship with the music hasn't changed. It's just that the world is a little different because a musician you've never met is dead and now you can examine what your life would have looked, smelled and tasted like if they had never existed.
Bowie was kind of like that for me. And Lou Reed. And Prince...
I really only let two of Prince's albums into my head, but they infiltrated so deeply that it's hard to imagine my adolescence without them.
Maybe the fairest measure of Prince's talent is the fact that he permeated my peer group. He drew the fandom of a car full of mid-80's middle-America white-bread homophobic teenage dudes who, previously united in their open and gleeful mockery of Michael Jackson, would inevitably memorize with digital clarity every wavelength of every sound of every note of every song on the Purple Rain Soundtrack album.
On its surface, Prince's music seems to simply be about wanting to bone every living thing. But it's richness and complexity merits closer examination, whereupon it becomes clear that his true obsession is the role of the disenfranchised, the search for self-identification and the creation of art within the construct of wanting to bone every living thing.
Fun Fact: The thing that launched Tipper Gore into motion was her discovering her daughter listening to "Darling Nikki."
If the combination of unfocused sexual energy and overwhelming self-doubt was a sound, it would be the sound of the wavering, buzzing synths at the end of "Automatic" from 1999, the notes that sustain after the rhythm tracks end. And if it's been a while, or if you've never had the experience of being, an American suburban teenager, find that sound, loop it, max it out your earbuds and then YOU sit in a painted cinder block room and try to learn trigonometry. Best of luck.
* * *
Everything above this point was typed and ready to post by Saturday. The next morning, I had a look at Twitter and saw someone offering their condolences to Patton Oswalt, whose Netflix special I had watched on Friday night, whose wife changed the way I felt about True Crime writing, whose wife was the guest on the only podcast out of maybe ten thousand that I've listened to where I immediately listened to the entire episode a second time, whose wife had been the topic of three conversations I had heard during the previous week, whose wife's amateur investigation into cold case homicides was so strangely productive that it made me wonder if maybe all of society's problems could be fixed by compulsive civilians, and whose wife, Michelle McNamara, 46, did not wake up on Thursday.
Where Prince's death opened a wistful revisitation to some old music I hadn't thought about in a while, the news of McNamara dying drew a gasp out of me and bummed out the rest of my day. She was 46. She and Oswalt have a seven year old daughter. The Golden State Killer is probably still alive. The last thing she tweeted about was this stupid election. Good and smart people don't always wake up.
I didn't know and wouldn't have ever met these people. It's just weird when they die.
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