Pajiba

Magic Johnson, HIV. As a 16 year old Laker fan, that was a pretty big deal.

And yeah, Phil Hartman's death...still stings.

Eduardo Guerrero.
Yes, I happened to be a wrestling fan back then. I still am quite a bit, and I know that I'll cry bitter tears if I ever get the message that the Taker has died.

Dammit.

Phil Hartman's death still makes me cry. I can't watch that particular episode of Newsradio ever again. It's worse than Jurassic Bark.

As trite as it is, Kurt Cobain's death bothered me too. I was a young grunge kid and adored his music.

Princess Diana bothered me too. I was 16 when she died and came home right at the moment that the tv station was showing the crashed Mercedes. She was so lovely and seemed like she was finally finding herself when the crash happened.

Dammit, now "You Are The Everything" is in my head, making my face twitch. It's funny, it was always just sorta there, nice enough song, but... When I got the repackage with the DVD-audio I was driving around and it suddenly really moved me, a few years older than most of the band were when they made it, but maybe it's part of aging, or at least my aging. Things can get resonance when you come back to them with some emotional context, they might have always had some potency, but they might still need you to grow up some more before they really hit. I've always been sensitive but I think I've become more attuned to when someone's art...I guess it's like the hammer hitting a piano string, if you will, hits a note of something fundamental about life.

That's a terrible metaphor, but I don't know how else to describe it. Songs can be relatable because I'M ANGRY TOO! or I'M SAD TOO! but with keener senses you can pick up on That Is Human Life. Sad things don't drive me towards tears, I pick up on love, yearning, hope, compassion, FEELING. The music from "Doomsday" doesn't make my eyes water, like it is now thinking about it, because it's a sad story, but because it's about feeling something SO MUCH. It doesn't matter that the story got a happier ending eventually, those powerful moments still happened. Playing a bunch of R.E.M. music Wednesday night got me misty not really because there wouldn't be any more music, but because I was surrounding myself with, again, those notes being hit. Some of the songs already had a big connection with me, but I was throwing all of them at myself.

I guess that's a verbose way of saying that I'm not an especially grieving kind of person (though I know I haven't experienced every kind of loss yet and fear what might happen) but more like a sentimental drunk (the type I am) at a wake. It didn't ruin my day when George Harrison died, but watching Billy Preston and Eric Clapton play "My Sweet Lord" destroys me, in the best way possible. I know they're sad, but what I'm getting is the untempered love. Something or someone ending doesn't have nearly the same effect as what has been left behind does. It wasn't shocking at all that Christopher Reeve died, but his personifying the love and hope and ideals of Superman... I'm not sad that Harry Potter's father died, but his realizing that the power of his father's memory is now a living part of him, his own power, carrying him forward, well...Niagara Falls, Frankie Angel. It's not that they leave, it's what they gave to help us keep going. I wasn't even quite two when Elvis Presley died, barely five when John Lennon died, but I can still cry because they gave their DAMNEDEST to give us something powerful while they were alive. As my friend said, watching "Elvis On Tour", "it is KILLING me, but I will sing for you." "The Impossible Dream" from the Madison Square Garden album....Christ. When Robert Smith dies it'll give me pause, but it'll be more important that he wrote "Fight". I'll pour another glass and thank him.

"I'm in you, more so when they put me in the ground."

"I think it's fair to say in the language of your age that I lived my dream...I owned the stage...gave it 110%...and I hope you have as much fun as I did...I was here to help."

Michael Jackson because he was all my childhood (i remember THRILLER 's TV premiere in France and how i was scary)and he was in full comeback:weirdly i even wasn't fan

there've been a few singer suicides that have shook me up, but the most devastating was that of vic chesnutt. not one month earlier i had listened to his interview by terry gross on fresh air. it was uplifting. particularly when he talked about his new song, "flirted with you all my life," which detailed his life-long "flirtation" with death--his many suicide attempts--and his current outlook of, "death, i'm not ready yet." it was so contrary, so shocking & devastating to me, to hear that he'd killed himself one month later. selfishly, i kept thinking that now i'd never have the chance to see him perform live.

River Phoenix's death. We were right about the same age, and he was at the height of being my man-crush.

John Kennedy Jr.

I'm still reeling from the sudden passing of John Holmes.

Clarence Clemons. The Biggest Man I ever seen.

Gianni Versace
Phil Hartman
River Phoenix
Amy Winehouse

Kevin Smith. No, not that one, the one that played Ares on Xena.

John Hughes. Although I wasn't born until after all his most influential movies had long left theatres, his films literally shaped my adolescents. His death really shocked me and I am still so devastated that I will never meet him.

A-man I feel your pain, his work touched a lot of people. He showered everyone with happiness. His passing was hard for many people to swallow. He was one in a million, they don't come any better than him. When he became big, he didn't leave any of his friends behind. His passing left a big hole to fill, he came and gone to quick.

I'm not really a grieving person, so to speak (hell my bio dad died 3 weeks ago and I had kind of forgotten. Of course, I'd only met him once, but that's another story...) but I remember being so sad that River Phoenix died. He had such a spark. And John Candy. And Chris Farley.

I only cried at Michael Jackson's death. I'm not even a huge fan.

I got sad when The Strokes (the band of my generation) stopped making music 5 years ago. But when they got out of hiatus earlier this year, I couldn't care less. I even skipped their set at Bonnaroo '11 in favor of some obscure electro band they clashed with. I couldn't even remember the name of that band or what country they came from.

I thought REM stopped a long time ago. I've only been seeing Stipe hanging out with Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow on a private plane, searching for the best crabs. Anyway, they'll be back after 5 years. Hopefully they won't get the same "The Strokes" treatment from anyone.

Heath Ledger. I still remember the moment I found out, while glancing at the cover of a tabloid in an Irish mini-mart while I was studying abroad. It put me in a daze.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned John Lennon. I had just graduated college when he was murdered and his death vaulted me more into adulthood than my degree. The lead in a LA Times article a few days later described a guy leafing through Beatles albums in a record store, looking up and saying, "I guess it's time to grow up." I catch myself wondering what he would have said about the events that have transpired since his death, especially 9/11.

I'm still pretty upset that Damien Rice & Lisa Hannigan aren't making music together anymore. And goddamnit I still have hope that someday they'll record something together again. Their voices just go together too fucking well to never sing together again.

I don’t know why everyone is so obsessed with celebrities and I’m not here to analyze that shit—maybe some other day.

I'll answer that on one paragraph:

Because our society has prevented us from doing anything meaningful with our lives, some great cause, that we are left with attaching those emotions to what permeates our lives 24/7. TV, Movies, Celebrities, Gossip and whatever inanities we have left to fill our lives after wasting away at a job we hate and being around people we might not like.

Michael Jackson - My first 'favourite song', when I was 3 years old, was 'black or white', and for the 6 months before he died I was SO excited about 'This is it' (the comeback tour).
I cried when I was watching the funeral. I still can't believe it :(

It's obvious how young(-ish) Pajiba readers tend to be, because no one has even mentioned the original Kennedy, JFK. I'm Canadian and was only ten when he was assassinated, but I clearly remember our principal announcing it over the PA at school and then sending us home. My friend and I went to his house and watched Cronkite's emotional broadcast. We could not believe this could happen to one who (to our young selves, at least) was such a great man.

Definitely March 8, 2072, when Prince finally died.

Thanks, The sandwich, for mentioning Elliott Smith. I was floored when I heard about his death.

Mr. Dressup. For those who didn't know him, he was essentially the Canadian Mr. Rogers. My first two pets I bought on my own were named Casey and Finnegan. I remember he had a tour stop scheduled in Kingston for November 2001, but he had a stroke and passed away a week later in September.

Oh, and I still can't think about Phil Hartman without tearing up.

Not a single death for me, but many deaths, and many diagnoses. I started college in 1982, lost my virginity a year later, and then -- the same year, in fact -- AIDS became something that straight people could get, too. Newsweek ran a cover story on the disease in 1983, and then, in 1985, featured Rock Hudson's death on the cover. Then Magic Johnson announced he was HIV+, and Rudolf Nureyev, and Ryan White, ... and the list goes on.

I'm not being obtuse here. AIDS is a human disease, not a gay disease, and obviously one can put oneself at risk if one engages in many activities, not all sexual in nature. But I think that it's hard for many persons born in the 1980s to imagine now how many straights, myself included, thought of AIDS as something only gays got, and only the "disgusting" ones that lived out-and-proud lives in places like San Francisco. You'd never catch it if you were God-fearin', good Christian folks living in little towns that surely had no perverts anywhere (ah, life in small-town America!). In 1987, just before I graduated from college, the hemophiliac brother of a friend died of complications from AIDS, and the only thing anyone wanted to know was "Was he gay?" -- asked in a breathless, lascivious, ooh-you-perv tone. He was 13, for Christ's sake.

I think I will always be sad when someone famous dies of AIDS, be they great geniuses like Freddie Mercury or just run-of-the-mill starlets, and I will always be sad when activists like Princess Diana die. Yes, she was (as she cheerfully described herself) "thick as a plank," and a little self-absorbed, and probably got a pass for bad behavior just because she was beautiful and royalty. But she visited terminal AIDS patients in hospitals, and held their bare hands in her own bare hands, without benefit of gloves or other protective clothing, at a time when HIV+ persons were being evicted from their apartments because their jackass landlords and neighbors thought that breathing the same air as an HIV+ person was enough to contract the disease. For me, most celebrity deaths are unremarkable, but a death from AIDS has an outsized impact on me.

There are plenty of celebrity deaths that felt surreal and affected me to some extent, most of which have already been mentioned, but as a Canadian, the one that currently sticks in my mind the most is the recent death of Jack Layton. I've voted NDP since I was 18 and he gave me hope for my country and for the good in people. His final letter was so well said and I definitely cried several times thinking about how he's gone.

'John Lennon shouldn't have died when he did.'

Oooooh, how true. Why just think if he had lived he and Yoko ( broke up the Betales because I'm such a jap slut) Ono could have made even more craptastic schmaltzy albums like Milk & Honey which the usual suspects in the music press, ie; Rolling Stone would have sucked the collective cock of, and ooooooh the two of them could have collaborated on and put out even more of Ono's singularly annoying shrieks/screechs/bleats packaged as 'indie/experimental music.'

Fuck both of them with a bag of stinking bloody dicks. Lennon was lucky he died when he did.

Kurt Cobain was probably the one that got to me the most, especially because you could see it coming.

I remember being 13, and seeing the premiere of the video for "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" I had never been so affected by music before. 18 years later, when R.E.M. announced that they had split, I actually shed a tear. The fact there simply won't be any more music from them breaks my heart a little.

Charlotte Coleman
John Peel
Jock Stein

All three lives tragically cut short.

Informative Site. Thanks for writing this. I'm going to facebook it to my buddies