Ahhhhh Death!!!!!!

No Grandpa, that's the cat.
Sorry couldn't resist.

No, I'm not going to wax philosophical about our time in this mortal coil. We die...get over it and pray that you take somebody with you. But I am going to be talking about a phenomenon that happens when an entertainer dies at the prime of his life. Suddenly, there's a magical influx of "fans" who said what fans they always were even if they never heard about this guy before they heard he or she was dead. Then, they built this guy up to be super-awesome even if that guy never was or never deserved to be.

Look at Brad Nowell from Sublime. They were hitting it big with that god-awful "What I Got" and the slightly less god-awful "Santeria". The fans were all marijuana-idiots who just didn't know better. Then Nowell OD's from heroin and suddenly normal, sober people were all into the band, calling them geniuses and wanting to resurrect Nowell so they can suck his zombie dick. And I wonder what's wrong with these people? First I'm going to discount "Wrong Way" and "Date Rape", by some miracle I do like those songs. Besides that, their jokes were horrible, the lyrics weak and the music boring. Also, they put the ska in the forefront of their music....and I FUCKING HATE SKA!!!!!! 311 doesn't put ska in the forefront of their music and look at them, awesome and not OD'ing from heroin. Anyways, what I'm saying was that Sublime was a shitty band before death and after death they magically became awesome with the same shitty music beloved by douchebags who should probably be punched in the face.

Alright, the next guy is someone I don't hate or dislike but death has made him into a God. That man...is Dimebag Darrell, the guitarist from Pantera. I'm not a big fan of Pantera but I do admire them and "Walk" is awesome enough to carry them through.....four studio albums that suffered because none of the songs on those albums were "Walk"! Also, pretty much all they did on tour besides fucking some shit up was drinking enough to kill a lot of people who aren't Pantera. And if that Behind the Music episode was accurate, then it would be a safe bet that Phil Anselmo, the singer, would have some awesome one-liner while he was all fucked-up on heroin. Then they happened to go their seperate ways into side-projects where some guy shot up Dimebag Darrell's side project with four or five bullets going into Darrell's head which sucks. The thing that gets me about Dimebag's death...besides the obligatory upgrade to Guitar God and the fans that magically appeared is that I saw a recent issue of some guitar magazine and they still have tributes to him on the cover. He died back in 2004 and somehow he's treated like he should be cared about now in 2008, going on 2009. I'm not taking anything away from Dimebag, just that he shouldn't be on covers on magazines that are more tributes to him.

Alright, so what does it take for me not to hate or dislike somebody's who died at the prime of their life/career? For somebody to be so awesome that his awesomeness level was at peak capacity at death. I can think of only two people that have "accomplished" that: Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain. With Hendrix, he bended the musical abilities of the guitar to astonishingly heights, then playing it with his teeth, probably have sex with it and then burning his guitar just cause he was that awesome. With Cobain and Nirvana came the grunge-era that spawned other bands like Alice in Chains and Soundgarden while killing off hair-metal once and for all. Then when they had their unfortunate deaths they were at their peak they had nothing to prove. That's a good celebrity death.