So we awoke this morning to the news of Whitney Houston’s death at the age of 48. While I’ve never been a fan of her genre of music, it’s still yet another life cut far too short and another great talent wasted by substance abuse.
In the last few years I’ve got to know quite a few members of various bands, so celebrity deaths come just a little bit closer to home for me. I pray this never happens to anyone I actually know. Makes me wonder if the price of success and fame is too high for some people.
I really detest the way the celebrity fame machine all-too-often chews people up and spits them out, like Aztec deities demanding blood sacrifices. Worse still is the way some pundits glamourise self-descructive behaviour as somehow “rock and roll”. I’m unrepentant about some very harsh things I’ve said in anger about one particular Guardian music critic over things he said about Amy Winehouse before her tragic but all-too-predicable early death.
I can certainly name of a few artists who’s work I admire who give the impression that they’ve gone very close to the abyss and only narrowly avoided falling in.
