Mike Shinoda Asks Not to Be Defined by Loss
The rule of threes feels a distant memory, doesn’t it? The past few years’ steady procession of famous people killed by illness (David Bowie and the slew of Baby Boomer icons to fall), suicide (too many examples this spring alone), or shocking calamity (the 20-year-old rapper XXXTentacion was shot dead Monday) has rendered popular culture an endless overlapping of public grief. This has many terrible secondary effects. One is that death and its ceremonies might leach energy and attention from the living. How can a culture—not to mention the individual loved ones and fans left behind—hope to progress when mourning is so often at the front of everyone’s minds?
That may sound like a gauche question, dishonoring the dead. Buttheissue of how and when tosoldier on after the unthinkable. But maybe now, amid a new wave of tragedies, there’s something to be said for an approach to celebrity death that, crass as it may seem, doesn’t dwell so myopically on the departed.
