Death Becomes Them

They crash, they burn, they suffer random overdoses and messy car crashes. When big-name stars are plucked from our midst before their time, we engage in earnest displays of public mourning and wonder about what might have been. But M. Taufiqurrahman says it’s best for everyone when pop stars quit while they are ahead.

Just like members of the Elvis cult who steadfastly contend that the King of Rock ‘n Roll is not dead and has only left the building, I may soon join the fraternity that believes Michael Jackson is still alive and has taken refuge in a fanciful hermit kingdom in California — not unlike the way he spent two decades cooped up at Neverland Ranch.

As much as I want to believe that Jackson is gone for good, it’s easier for me to buy into the idea that he faked his own death to escape his multimillion-dollar debts and legal woes.

Sony BMG/Bloomberg

But should I ultimately come around to the fact that he did succumb to a heart attack, I will still disagree with the rabid fans and tear-jerking critics who eulogize that the moonwalker died too soon.

At the risk of angering seven nations of Jackson fans, I believe his death was a long time coming. It was a slow and painful exit for Jacko, whose star was in a steep descent following the weak post-Dangerous record sales, the child molestation scandals, the flop reissue and the vaunted comeback show that never was.

Elvis was in a more favorable situation than the former Jackson Five star, as he only had to deal with an expanding waistline and a couple of crappy live albums after his youthful success before his final “hit” on the bathroom floor.

But both Jackson and Presley violated rock ‘n’ roll’s cardinal rule that a rock star should die young and never, ever go gray in the public spotlight.

The annals of rock ‘n’ roll are teeming with middling and little-known performers who died in obscurity but were lionized after their death (I am not talking about the Doors’ Jim Morrison or Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain).

Take Nick Drake. These days, all self-respecting members of folk-reviving indie bands will drop the name of the Cambridge native in an attempt to get some semblance of credibility. It is safe to say that freak folk movement leader Devendra Banhart forged his musical career on Drake’s first two albums, Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter.

For regular fans, the holy writ that they should learn is that Drake died from ingesting too many sleeping pills soon after he surrendered the master tape for his third album Pink Moon to Island Records’ secretary. And it was then that fame came calling.

Then there’s Jeff Buckley, the American rock singer who died young after enduring a 31-year Shakespearian tragedy. All his life Jeff Buckley did his best to escape from the shadow of his semi-famous country-folk singer father, Tim Buckley. The sad irony was that the junior Buckley’s breakout performance came in a tribute show to his father.

AP

At the apex of his career among the living, Buckley’s music only appealed to a small circle of fans jaded by the onslaught of grunge. Despite his impressive cheekbones, his studio album Grace shifted only half a million units when it was released in 1994.

People only started to catch on to Buckley’s music after he drowned in the Mississippi River. Grace has been named one of the best rock albums of all time and reissued numerous times. Even material of inferior quality from Buckley’s days in obscurity has been dredged up to pad out his thin musical resume.

There’s something dark and alluring about pop stars’ premature deaths, especially when they die under mysterious circumstances involving sleeping pills, shotguns, drowning or, in the case of INXS’ lead singer Michael Hutchence, something called autoerotic asphyxiation. They certainly suffered for their art.

It’s probably because we just don’t want to see a venerated rocker like Lou Reed, once the epitome of New York cool, turn into a bitter old man with a penchant for insulting young music writers. Here’s an excerpt from an interview he gave Spin magazine’s David Marchese for the magazine’s October 2008 edition:

Question: Singing about gay life on albums like [1972's] Transformer was definitely transgressive at the time. But now, playing with sexuality and gender is part of the mainstream. Do you feel like the center has come to you?

Reed: That's truly a critic's kind of question. I have absolutely no idea about anything.

The rule of thumb of dying young – and thereby securing long-lasting posthumous fame – also applies to retiring early. Groups should disband after three records, for anything beyond the third album becomes a waste of studio time. Live shows built on material beyond that only serve as a parody of their former selves.

Somebody really should have told Pearl Jam that after their third outing Vitalogy, as it would have saved the band from the humiliation that came with releasing such a sub-par effort as Yield. And the only reason U2 came up with elaborately staged shows in the post-Zooropa period was simply because their music had become excruciatingly boring in the wake of The Joshua Tree.

On the local front, I wish rock legends like Slank and Iwan Fals had left the music scene in the early 1990s, when they still had something interesting to say about the claustrophobic reality of living under the New Order regime.

Iwan’s collaboration with super-group Kantata Taqwa reaped timeless classics that would shame even bands like King Crimson. His politically charged solo works inspired young activists who helped oust Soeharto in 1998.

Doing the right thing by retiring early would have saved these supposed rock immortals from something as preposterous as posing half-naked under the national red-and-white flag for the local edition of a US-based music rag (Iwan apparently got the irony of it all and decided to be properly clothed for the photo shoot).

And it also would have spared critics from feeling they had to write favorable reviews of what was basically tasteless pap simply because of the “legends”.

Don’t get me started on Gigi.

Some performers are destined for greatness, and some of these great performers voluntarily step back from the spotlight before their shelf lives expire (The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and The Smiths are among them).

These types of bands, who know when to let others take the stage, made the music scene interesting. The rest is just noise.

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