Post the Twelfth: Celebrity death is tragic, not trendy.

Apparently righteous indignation is something that comes in shorter bursts these days. I realized a lot of my frustrations I've been venting on Twitter, in streams of tweets, and I think it's past time I brought some of those over here where they belong: the rantspace where I scream and beg for common sense. So allow me to expound on my most recent tweetburst by knocking some heads in regards to celebrities again.

So Prince died recently. The artist, I mean. He was famous enough that even I, who tend to occupy a very cozy space underneath a rock where the world can't piss me off, knew who he was: "that dude who did Purple Rain, right? I should listen to that someday". Standing in an FYE, listening to my brother making small talk with a cashier, I learned that all of the Prince albums in the store had sold out post-mortem. Of course they did, was my first thought. And then I felt bad for thinking it. And then I felt frustrated again because I felt bad about feeling cynical about people cashing in on what's currently trendy: mourning the loss of a star.
Because that's what that is. It's folks hearing about the loss of someone famous, jumping on the pity bandwagon, and remembering him for a month or two because that's where the party's at. And then, at the end of that second month? Onto the next shiny object. I got frustrated because I'd seen it before.
This is a man who, for the most part, we (or at least I) have heard nothing of in the past decade, who I have only ever heard mocked in regards to the phase in which he was "The Artist Formerly Known As Prince", whose music failed to reach me in any capacity (or at least in any capacity where I know that he, specifically, was the one singing it), and who managed to straddle a line between just obscure enough to ignore and just famous enough to be a pop culture icon. I only ever heard about him when he was being poked fun at on Family Guy or Robot Chicken or whoever else was using him for a cheap gag that day. Checking his Wikipedia page, I had no idea he was still producing music past the 1990's until I saw his discography at the bottom listing him as having put stuff out in 2015. In short, he was relevant once, but not anymore, and yet after he died the internet exploded with the tears of a million fans.
I'd seen it before with Michael Jackson. He was universally made fun of for being a pedophile and "the only black man to ever become a white woman", but the day he died, billions of crocodile tears were shed. Suddenly all of the things ever said at his expense went silent, a game or three was released bearing his name, and everybody waved a fond farewell to him with the DVD of his final concert, now available for the limited-time price of some number I can't be assed to remember.
You hypocrites. You don't get to say one day that they're an embarrassment to the human race and then turn around and say that their death is a tragic loss of talent. Pick an opinion and stick with it.
Now clearly, I don't mean to say that we're not allowed to mourn the death of someone. Michael Jackson's passing kind of hurt, because I was introduced to his greatest hits in middle school by a teacher of mine, and came to appreciate his music shortly before said teacher died. It became a sort of emotional link for me- this guy made catchy tunes that also reminded me of someone I lost. But as discussed here, I don't believe in celebrity worship. To see everybody bawling about Prince as if they were personally injured by his passing, makes me wonder how many of them actually are affected in that same way.
God knows that to someone out there, Prince's music was a light that led them out of the darkness of suicide, a safe place where they could escape from bullying, a fond memory of a shared kiss with one's first love, or a thing they could turn up to drown out fighting parents. That's fine- That's a positive thing! But me? I won't pretend that this famous guy who had zero influence on my formative years, whom I had never met, and whom I was given no reason to care about, left me anything but completely and totally unfazed. I feel that it is a far greater disservice to his memory to play along with all of the grief for a week or two and then toss it out the door in favor of the next SCANDALOUS thing to happen in Hollywood (or the musical equivalent thereof), than it is to admit that while it sucks, I simply don't care.
To his family and his true fans: in your time of mourning, I offer my actual condolences. I'm sure he was a great man, and a talented artist.
To everyone else out there, the ones who crawled out of the woodwork to buy out FYE's stock of Prince albums, answer me this: If you were really a fan, where the hell were you all this time? If you actually gave a damn about his work, you might have gone out and grabbed those sooner. But you didn't, and you don't. You're just another parasite in the horde, riding the bandwagon because it's 'in' to feel sad about him. Move the hell along, nobody needs your kind of sympathy.