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Death Shall Not Be Mocked by TheChisa (come@me.bro) on May 5, 2012 08:55:10 AM

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or, Why Our Obsession With Celebrities Reveals Just How Broken We Are As A Species   It wasn't Whitney Houston that did it. Nor was it Dick Clark, Steve Jobs, Mike Wallace, Ralph McQuarrie, Davy Jones, Don Cornelius, Thomas Kinkade, Moebius, Joe Paterno, Etta James or Heavy D. A few of those were marked by friends with sadness and respect (the domestic partner is still watching old episodes of Soul Train in vigil), a few were noted with small fanfare and tersely polite words like "notable" and "universal". Even the outright despicable ones who were mired in scandal seemed to be given a free pass once the Grim Reaper called their number. But I fielded it all. I let my friends have their grief, however inappropriate it might have seemed. Heck, I've been guilty of it myself; I wrote an entire article about the death of Michael Jackson, proving I wasn't immune to this social bias for respecting the dead. No, the straw that broke the camel's back, that made me realize just how utterly full of shit I and my fellow humans were, was MCA of the Beastie Boys. I shouldn't have to explain who the Beastie Boys are, but I'm going to, because for as ubiquitous as they are in the cultural consciousness, very few people know the things they have actually done. So here's a quick rundown: • The original lineup of the Beasties included drummer Kate Shellenbach (later of Luscious Jackson) who was asked to leave the group prior to their major Def Jam debut for, you know, being female. • The song "Pass The Mic", having illegally sampled "Choir" by James Newton, became the focus of the landmark legal case Newton vs Diamond, in which the Beasties counter-sued Newton and won, forcing him, in an unprecedentedly dickish move, to pay a million dollars for being sampled (rather sickeningly ironic seeing as another landmark sampling case, Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., had set the very laws the Beasties had flagrantly skirted by assfucking their pal Biz Markie). • Numerous apocryphal tales exist of them being jerks to session musicians and fans alike, and loads of other rappers have little to no respect for them -- such as MC Serch of 3rd Bass: "To me, they were the Antichrist; they didn't go to Union Square. I was (a white MC) busting my ass in the streets going through what I considered the proper hip-hop, urban channels and these guys go on tour with Run-D.M.C. To me, they were the worst possible thing to happen to hip-hop culture." In short we have here a group of privileged, misogynist, abusive middle-class Jewish guys whose sole measurable accomplishment is making it socially okay for white people to rap, which, speaking as a white rapper, I'm still not convinced is okay. Oh, and also something something Tibet something. And yet the outpouring of grief for the passing of only one of these knuckleheads was tremendously disproportionate to both their actual achievements and their social perceptions! Never before have I seen such a deluge of unwarranted hand-wringing from people I otherwise found to be rational and even-headed -- well, no, that's a lie of omission. I should have said from WHITE people. My black friends, whom I assume are well versed in the deaths of rappers from their own genetic lineage, let the moment pass with little more than a shrug. Though my well-established disgust for the Beastie Boys is certainly not a dismissible variable here, there is a larger point. I am not a monster; my problem here is not with grief itself, which is a necessary and viable emotion for dealing with personal tragedy. My problem is with misplaced grief, offered to people that you didn't know from Adam (Yauch), to whom you had no personal connection except one invented through the use of convenient illusions -- in this particular case, the emotional connection to music. Now, I could argue until I'm blue in the face the demerits of the Beastie Boys audible offerings, but that's a losing battle. You like the music, I don't. It's pointless to convince you you're wrong, because there is no concrete value for "wrong" here; de gustibus non est disputandum, and that's that. I submit to the possibility that there is a scenario where the Beastie Boys can be considered a worthwhile artistic experience. But that is all it is -- an artistic experience, not a personal one. The transmission lines go one way, from the musician to you. There is no feedback, no conversation. Any particulars taken from the offerings are coincidental at best, and willful self-reinvention at worst. It's like the whole world never heard the lyrics to "Killing Me Softly". Twitter and reality television have only made these delusions worse. Now we think we have a connection to Kanye West and Wil Wheaton; now we think that because they put goofballs like us on "Swamp People" and "Ink Master" and "Pawn Stars" that we exist on equal footing with our idols. But that mode of thinking is flawed, because it reinforces the celebrity/nobody divide rather than eradicating it. If there weren't an extant dichotomy that delineated the people worth knowing in the first place, there would be no need to strive for their level of importance. Exceptio probat regulam, to quote Cicero. Worst of all, in death these defined notables are outright canonized. People have a strong social tendency to refrain from speaking ill of the dead, I surmise because they don't want to be spoken ill of when it's their time. But with celebrity, this is taken to outright absurd levels. Consider the death of politician Strom Thurmond, who was so detestable a human being that his obituary was limited to: • he was in Congress a really long time • hey, he wasn't always a racist • uh... did we mention the really long time thing already? For that matter, the more recently deceased Kim Jong Il, long vilified as a card-carrying Axis of Evil member, was just plain not talked about except in the context of his progeny, Kim Jong Un, whom was apparently okay to keep calling an evil fuck on account of his being alive. Enough is enough! I'm tired of this continuous trend of historical revisionism in the service of mortality! Most of these people were horrible assholes. Whitney Houston: CRACK ADDICT. Steve Jobs: EXPLOITATIVE ABUSIVE CONTROL FREAK. Thomas Kinkade: WILDLY CONSERVATIVE ALCOHOLIC MISOGYNIST WHO LITERALLY PISSED ON THINGS TO MARK HIS TERRITORY. Davy Jones: ...well, okay, you've got me there, he really was just a pretty nice guy. Hey, not everyone is a terrible piece of shit! If we're to be damned to oblivion, should we not be damned for who we really are, with both the merits and offenses for which we are equally and truly guilty? Ah, but that's the most pernicious ruse of the death ritual, because if one is to judge these celebrities by such standards, one is led to the conclusion that there was no real reason for most of them to be considered important in the first place. And that means we were tricked into believing in the lie of personal connection to said celebrities. And that certainly can't be correct! So while you sit back and wonder why, I got this fucking thorn in my side, Oh my God, it's a mirage, I'm tellin' y'all, It's a SABOTAGE! *turntables*

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