Is six feet under the only safe haven for celebrities?

Why the rich and the famous don’t have to fear the reaper

By Jacey Gibb

es, another promising musician
\ was added to the infamous
‘Died at 27 years old’ hall
of fame as Amy Winehouse checked
out early on July 23rd. Now, I’m
not sure about you but before word
on her demise started to spread, I
can’t remember the last time I heard
someone pay this troubled songstress
a compliment. For a while it seemed
that any joke made about rehab or
substance abuse was required by law
to contain some kind of a Winehouse
reference. However, it seems that as
soon as the news broke that she had
died, my Facebook newsfeed became
overpopulated with updates calling her
an angel and hoping that she rest in
peace. At first I assumed this was just
another Facebook fan bandwagon, but
over the past few weeks there has been
a steady stream of public mourning for
Winehouse and it honestly makes me
sick. Where have all these fans been
hiding for all these years?
I’m not saying that people shouldn’t

pay their respects to the dead and show
some sympathy when someone passes
away, but it seems like the only way
for some celebrities to gain public
support is to be dead. Once they achieve
this pinnacle of mortality, everyone
feels obligated to look back on their
career and marvel at how talented and
promising they once were. One of the
most recent examples of this would
obviously be when the King of Pop
bit the dust back in 2009. I remember
walking around on Canada Day later
that week and one of our group was
carrying a speaker box with Michael
Jackson playing on a constant loop. Our
friend had always been a fan so it didn’t
come across as unusual at the time but
that night, the amount of strangers who
praised us for our selected soundtrack
for the evening was astonishing. Over
were the days of pedophile puns and
caring about the music were suddenly
what mattered.

I’m as guilty as the next person
when it comes to celebrity bashing,
but at least I’m not going to go out and
buy an Amy Winehouse t-shirt and

tell people all about how she was just
misunderstood. In Chuck Klosterman’s
book Killing yourself to Live, he spends
several weeks touring the United States
and visiting places where famous rock
stars died. While the idea may seem
morbid and the execution isn’t nearly as
interesting as you would first suspect, he
makes a stray observation that suicide
immediately provides the dead with the
characteristics that they failed to possess
when they were alive. This means we
end up attaching all of the positive
labels and traits that we had been unable
to do before, mostly because the person
is now dead and unable to tarnish such
praise in the future.

Death is a crappy part of life and
it’s never a fun thing to go through, but
stop acting like the death of someone
you’d never met and didn’t even know
personally has affected you so much.
If Amy Winehouse were still alive
today, the tabloids would have articles
advertising her latest scandals, not
tributes. I guess death is one of the only
ways to get peace and respected these
days.

 

 

 

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