FILE- In this Feb. 4, 2007, file photo, Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI at Dolphin Stadium in Miami. In an industry where collaborations with other artists and credits are negotiated as heavily as world treaties, Prince followed only one credo when it came to working with others: the love of the music. Prince died Thursday, April 21, 2016, at his home outside Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
This year has already been a tough one for celebrity deaths. There is a bizarre grief cycle the Internet goes through whenever someone of notable importance dies. It can easily be likened to the standard human grief process, because that’s what it is at its most base level. But as with so much else these days, it’s been put through the filter of the Internet, so it’s broad and wacky, and often carries an air of self-serving-ness to it.
I am as guilty of this as anyone else. The first column I ever wrote for La Born Explains It All was an obituary for Robin Williams, the last celebrity whose death had a profound effect on me. When Alan Rickman died, I joined millions of other Harry Potter fans around the world and changed my Facebook photo to a wand releasing blue light (others had green, red, and yellow) which we will do dozens more times in the coming years as more of the actors and actresses from that franchise pass on. I’ve taken weird, mournful photographs, though I’m usually absent from them, and said something about what I was doing to remember these people.
This is why it all felt so strange to me to be an outsider looking in on the mourning process of the Internet this week. Prince died, and while I am perfectly capable of acknowledging what a significant person in music he was, by the time I was old enough to care, Prince had long gone into his “weird recluse” phase of music. In recent years he’s made something of a comeback, but for a long time, all I knew of Prince was crushed velvet and frilly shirts and purple, stories told by Kevin Smith about weird things that happened during a documentary he filmed but never got to release, stories told by Charlie Murphy through the medium of Dave Chappelle. Prince was mythical to me, a legend, the oral equivalent of the weird house down the street that everyone passes during Halloween, intriguing but strange and foreboding at the same time.
People go through the motions of grief, but the grief cycle of the internet also tends to feel disingenuous. The stories of CNN, Buzzfeed, and the wider news cycle, special episodes put out by SNL designed to generate viewers and capitalize on this tragedy feel, somehow, wrong. The same thing happened when Michael Jackson died, though the Internet has grown significantly since then. Jackson was a tumultuous figure in the media, and had been for well over a decade at the point of his death. Embroiled in molestation case after molestation case, the media generally treated him as a sideshow. Then, of course, the sideshow became his death, his children, his family, his estate.
Prince was much less polarizing, but still had his share of Internet criticism and controversy. Since he was notoriously private, everything was second-hand information though, so people who loved him never really believed that His Holy Purpleness could possibly be as conservatively religious as reports made him, and the thought of him opposing marriage equality was strange and foreign. This was Prince.
Even so, Internet media reported these things with articles chock-full of side-eye. Then they joined the world in Purplefying their day, publishing dozens of articles, each one a guaranteed hit for their respective audience, about Prince and what Prince meant. Anyone who said anything in forming another opinion was met with the internet’s special form of disdain. Unacceptable!
Through it all I’ve just kind of sat back and watched. The death I was caught up with this week was that of Michelle McNamara, the wife of one of my favorite comedians Patton Oswalt, who died suddenly in her sleep this weekend, immediately following her Husband’s newest comedy special coming to Netflix. Prince was, to me and to so many others, an enigma. He was just one I wasn’t really interested in solving. In the coming days, autopsy details will be released, and the nation will likely be caught up in the same conversations we had the last time a royal pop god died. And the internet’s mourning cycle will complete, and we will move on until the next celebrity of some note passes, when the entire thing will pick back up again.
Rectifying Death And Celebrity
FILE- In this Feb. 4, 2007, file photo, Prince performs during the halftime show at Super Bowl XLI at Dolphin Stadium in Miami. In an industry where collaborations with other artists and credits are negotiated as heavily as world treaties, Prince followed only one credo when it came to working with others: the love of the music. Prince died Thursday, April 21, 2016, at his home outside Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
This year has already been a tough one for celebrity deaths. There is a bizarre grief cycle the Internet goes through whenever someone of notable importance dies. It can easily be likened to the standard human grief process, because that’s what it is at its most base level. But as with so much else these days, it’s been put through the filter of the Internet, so it’s broad and wacky, and often carries an air of self-serving-ness to it.
I am as guilty of this as anyone else. The first column I ever wrote for La Born Explains It All was an obituary for Robin Williams, the last celebrity whose death had a profound effect on me. When Alan Rickman died, I joined millions of other Harry Potter fans around the world and changed my Facebook photo to a wand releasing blue light (others had green, red, and yellow) which we will do dozens more times in the coming years as more of the actors and actresses from that franchise pass on. I’ve taken weird, mournful photographs, though I’m usually absent from them, and said something about what I was doing to remember these people.
This is why it all felt so strange to me to be an outsider looking in on the mourning process of the Internet this week. Prince died, and while I am perfectly capable of acknowledging what a significant person in music he was, by the time I was old enough to care, Prince had long gone into his “weird recluse” phase of music. In recent years he’s made something of a comeback, but for a long time, all I knew of Prince was crushed velvet and frilly shirts and purple, stories told by Kevin Smith about weird things that happened during a documentary he filmed but never got to release, stories told by Charlie Murphy through the medium of Dave Chappelle. Prince was mythical to me, a legend, the oral equivalent of the weird house down the street that everyone passes during Halloween, intriguing but strange and foreboding at the same time.
People go through the motions of grief, but the grief cycle of the internet also tends to feel disingenuous. The stories of CNN, Buzzfeed, and the wider news cycle, special episodes put out by SNL designed to generate viewers and capitalize on this tragedy feel, somehow, wrong. The same thing happened when Michael Jackson died, though the Internet has grown significantly since then. Jackson was a tumultuous figure in the media, and had been for well over a decade at the point of his death. Embroiled in molestation case after molestation case, the media generally treated him as a sideshow. Then, of course, the sideshow became his death, his children, his family, his estate.
Prince was much less polarizing, but still had his share of Internet criticism and controversy. Since he was notoriously private, everything was second-hand information though, so people who loved him never really believed that His Holy Purpleness could possibly be as conservatively religious as reports made him, and the thought of him opposing marriage equality was strange and foreign. This was Prince.
Even so, Internet media reported these things with articles chock-full of side-eye. Then they joined the world in Purplefying their day, publishing dozens of articles, each one a guaranteed hit for their respective audience, about Prince and what Prince meant. Anyone who said anything in forming another opinion was met with the internet’s special form of disdain. Unacceptable!
Through it all I’ve just kind of sat back and watched. The death I was caught up with this week was that of Michelle McNamara, the wife of one of my favorite comedians Patton Oswalt, who died suddenly in her sleep this weekend, immediately following her Husband’s newest comedy special coming to Netflix. Prince was, to me and to so many others, an enigma. He was just one I wasn’t really interested in solving. In the coming days, autopsy details will be released, and the nation will likely be caught up in the same conversations we had the last time a royal pop god died. And the internet’s mourning cycle will complete, and we will move on until the next celebrity of some note passes, when the entire thing will pick back up again.