RIP Whitney Houston

No but Brad Renfro's death made me take stock on myself and my life.

 

I don't think anyone ever thought Whitney would be the "greatest ever," however that could even be measured. Jackson, there's a strong argument to be made that he WAS the greatest entertainer ever; by the time his weirdness overtook him he had already gotten pretty damn huge. Tyson and Gooden didn't achieve the heights they were supposed to (although Tyson's career, looking back, was pretty respectable by any standard to measure a champion of an era).

I really don't think there was a huge number of people who were even thinking "this will be the best ever!!!!!!" out of a lot of them. People, aside from sportswriters who want to tabulate lists, don't tend to think like that anyway.

 

Also, I highly doubt a 15-year-old Simmons was actually thinking about these people in terms of ranking them against those considered to be some of the best in their genres. I'm guessing that's just him retrospectively placing those thoughts and perceptions in his head.

 

Deaths that affected me:

Olin/Crews
Aaliyah

 

So was that you on the old board who was screaming when we were making Aaliyah jokes?

That was one of my favorite threads of all-time.

 

Was it the old board? I didn't even remember posting until it was SportsJournalists.com. Hmmm. But yes, since it was 2001, it was me.

 

Biggie Smalls.

I was a young man and thought very highly of him.

 

I just remember we didn't have to be registered at the time, which is why we had posts like:

"I don't undersand why people are so scared to fly." Posted by Thurman Munson, Roberto Clemente, the La Bamba dude, Buddy Holly, the dead guy from Skynyrd, Everyone who used to know Bonnie Raitt, etc...

 

I think it's really difficult to argue that Michael Jackson didn't deliver. He was a pop star, and he was the best-ever at it. If we want to think about this like sports with regression to the mean and so forth, he was never going to replicate the "Thriller" success. Not even if his subsequent albums were better. Hell, I think you could argue that he outperformed what would be realistic expectations of follow-up albums for such a young artist. Pop success is, by nature, really fleeting. Even more fleeting than athletic success, quite often. I think your legacy can be largely and fairly assessed on one or two albums, and anything beyond that is gravy.

If there is anything disappointing about a Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston, it is that they never progressed into more adventurous late-period music-making a la a John Mellencamp or Lindsey Buckingham, even if that kind of stuff doesn't often mean commercial success. But I'm not sure that in any way taints their pop success.

 

Just a shame. She was the same age as me and I enjoyed her music so much. She burst on the scene with just a fabulous debut album ("So I'm Saving All My Love for You") then unfortunately the Bobby Brown marriage. Her "I Will Always Love You" is a classic. Way too young. RIP.

 

I think there are plenty of singers who are given icon status or are remembered as being better than they actually were because they died so young. You can say that about Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse...

I think there are others that how they lived toward their end of their lives obscures some of their greatness as performers. There are a lot of people who remember the "Kiss My Ass" clip from Being Bobby Brown and the six trillion replays on The Soup as much as they do the anthem at the Bills-Giants Super Bowl. I'm not saying that's right, but if you're under 25, sadly that's probably the case...

Same thing with Michael Jackson and all of the pedophilia stuff.

 

A couple that actually had a larger impact to me in years later as opposed to the specific moment:

Zeppelin was about to tour when Bonham died. That finished the buzz around that tour and album, and as time passed, it became clear that also brought the end to Zeppelin.

And one that I came to appreciate more and more as the years of the late 70s and then the 80s went by was the loss of Keith Moon. The world was much less entertaining and certainly short one of the all timers behind the drum kit when he was gone.