Just making a general point here that this event has surfaced..
I dont get why people are so emotional when famous artists die. Posting on facebook and whatnot..
We werent personal friends with them, so it wont affect our lives in any way. Their works are still as available as ever, and still as great as ever. We can still listen to their music every day.
If they died old then they've had a good run to make a good body of great work that can be their direct legacy for hundreds of years. Few people achieve that.
My father once explained to me, when I was very young and my 12-year old cousin had died of cancer, that the reason I was in pain and suffering was not because my cousin was dead and he would not be enjoying his next birthday, or that he would not be coming with us for the next vacation.
The reason I was in pain was because I was not going to enjoy him anymore. In the end, he was dead already. He could not feel or enjoy anything anymore, so why be sad for him?
So maybe when someone that through art or knowledge or whatever touches people in a certain way, and then that person passes away, it makes people sad because they will not be able to enjoy any new music, any new takes on life, any new works, etc.
Yes, we now have YouTube and digital media so we can keep listening to John Coltrane and Leonard Cohen, but the fact that we won't be able to keep growing up with them makes it painful. Even if they are not your friends, they are people you admire. They are people that will no longer produce any "new wisdom" for you to absorb and savor.
When someone like say, Dennis Ritchie died, we (HN, engineers, <other placeholder>) got sad because there would be no new insights coming from this great mind. He's not going to be able to comment on, say, SpaceX's first trip to Mars or whatever.
So in the end we are the ones deprived of these great minds' wisdom and thus we are the ones that ache and suffer.
That's my take on it at least. Maybe it's not what's actually happening but it kinda make sense to me :)
"We werent personal friends with them, so it wont affect our lives in any way"
Life is about the search for value, and most often you find that in other people, their ideas, and their lives. Singers and other artists selectively create a public representation of their value-judgments, and people who find those values resonate in them come to love those artists in a very personal way.
> I dont get why people are so emotional when famous artists die. Posting on facebook and whatnot.. We werent personal friends with them, so it wont affect our lives in any way.
I mentioned in another thread how touching it was that Cohen always addressed his audience as 'friends'. It is a little thing, but he wanted to connect with us personally—he was a poet much more than a performer, I think—and he did, and I feel it as a personal loss even if I was never physically any closer to the man than one seat at one of his concerts.
If you don't feel it, or any loss of anyone famous, personally, then that's totally reasonable; but why try to dismiss others' sense of loss?
My mother knows I have been a longtime fan of Leonard Cohen. I received some texts this morning saying she hoped I wasn't sad. Not at all - I presume he lived a great life. His death doesn't affect me and it doesn't change my enjoyment of his music or writing. Those are works created in certain moments of time, that's what matters and cannot be erased.
Some artists die having more to make, more to say. Bowie or Prince could have had a dozen more albums, and thousands more design ideas, photos, and poignant commentaries. Those moments of joy could have surfaced here and there over decades, but instead they're all gone in one day.
Leonard Cohen wasn't as young as some of them, but he was still active. I looked forward to his thoughts and music on many things.
I dont get why people are so emotional when famous artists die. Posting on facebook and whatnot.. We werent personal friends with them, so it wont affect our lives in any way. Their works are still as available as ever, and still as great as ever. We can still listen to their music every day.
If they died old then they've had a good run to make a good body of great work that can be their direct legacy for hundreds of years. Few people achieve that.