Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I

Backlash Blues

Dying for popularity

Death since the Internet took over

Forget about coming out of the closet or reuniting your band. The best way to spring back into the spotlight is to die. Several groundbreaking artists have attempted this technique to varying degrees of success. Kurt Cobain's suicide lionized him. Dying worked perfectly into Andy Kaufman's schtick. I'm of the opinion that Tupac is currently slurping a drink out of a coconut on an undisclosed island, but his perceived deadness has paid dividends. Now that the Internet has made it possible to find out practically everything about living things, it's only natural that we have the inside track on expiration too. But to me, it's during the times where we jump the gun that we actually achieve a glimpse at the way media has changed and how different musical movements choose to deal with the life status of artists.

Earlier this month, the hip-hop community was inundated by Twitters and blogs claiming Guru, rapper from the legendary old-school rap group Gangstarr, had fallen into a coma as a result of a heart attack and was close to death. Rumours spread rapidly through social media. Well-wishers came in droves, sprinkling the Internet with YouTube videos and album uploads in honour of his greatest hits, as if already in memoriam. Over time it was revealed that the heart attack happened but was not as extreme as originally presented and that Guru was alive and well.

Yet, for some reason, Guru is not allowing his family to visit him at the hospital. This was illuminated by a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqnCNsQd68A) of his nephew, Justin Nicholas Elam-Ruff, choking back tears and speaking about family members being denied access by a man called Solar. I was unfamiliar with his name, but eventually realized that Solar has been producing the last few unremarkable Guru solo releases since the permanent hiatus of Gangstarr and has somehow enacted a Rasputin-esque control over all of Guru's personal affairs.

In his desire to expand beyond his role as music collaborator and manage every aspect of Guru's recuperation, Solar (who commonly attaches the prefix Superproducer to his nom de plume) has taken on the appearance of a svengali, an evil overseer steering a brainwashed individual into oblivion. And as this has come to light under the muckraking gaze of our post-Tiger Woods media environment, the tweetlings of the unedited mire we call the Internet have taken to observing their relationship as being potentially sexually motivated as well.

This is based on a couple unassuming pictures of them together and the admittedly one-sided control aspect to their partnership. Jumping to the sexual conclusion says more about how hip-hop culture deals with homosexuality than it does with the actual extent of Guru and Solar's relationship. Ever the arena for masculine posturing, one-upmanship and aggression, the possibility of a former hip-hop hero being into men is so unappealing that some message board denizens threaten to "erase the Gangstarr from their hard drives" if it's ever confirmed.

Why isn't it possible that Guru is just a weak-willed individual? This situation reminds me of the one between the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson and his therapist Eugene Landy in the '70s. Like Guru, Wilson was at odds with his former collaborators. Wilson got off illicit drugs (and onto psychologically accepted ones) through Dr Landy's therapy; Solar is rumoured to have helped Guru deal with alcohol abuse issues. Both partnerships outwardly present a parasitic picture. Rap music, in my opinion, has the highest potential of any genre for experimentation because its foundation is based on recontextualizing other genres of music into a different framework. Yet the people who make it almost uniformly seem to hold conservative social values and hardline traditionalist stances.

Most recently, Solar leaked a "new" Guru song (unlikely to be recorded post-heart attack) he produced called "Mr. Gangstarr" that sounds incomplete and has the weak, patchwork nature of your average posthumous release. Except he isn't dead yet. And that almost seems to disappoint the Gangstarr massive, who either wish he died so they can own his memory through a partial discography that excludes the Solar compositions or selfishly want him to return to a life that seems to have failed him. If Guru was gay, many rap fans would feel uncomfortable having ever supported him. If he's merely weak-willed, those same rap fans would rather not reflect that affectation by listening to him either.

With indie rock, fans respond too far into the other extreme. Juxtapose this situation with that of the similarly-aged Alex Chilton, who actually died of a heart attack last week, preceding a performance with the newly reunited Big Star at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas. For the modern online music fan, the instant impulse is to post a YouTube video to a social networking site or quote a lyric as a way of coping, but gestures like these feel so kneejerk and disingenuous that I'm no longer comfortable expressing my sadness in situations like this publicly.
Guru fans went from championing his best achievements to wondering about his life choices to, in some cases, outright vilifying him for the potential of rumours to be true. Grieving for artists has been streamlined and now seems like just a part of the news cycle that we rapidly refer the findings of.

The Chilton death was broken by a local newspaper (Memphis's Commercial Appeal), which now seems to be a more plausible source than the big national companies clamouring to get a jump on the Internet. Gordon Lightfoot's "near death experience" (the biggest game of telephone ever played by respected news outlets lobbying to outweb the web) is an argument against Twitter and the total decentralization of news media. Without local news and traditional news aggregators like the Associated Press, there will be no authority on the truth, however flawed the old system might be in other ways.

Our current state of constant nostalgia no longer allows us to absorb or reference anything with the present in mind. Instead of jumping to memorialize our heroes by spreading their work around for free and using knowledge of their oeuvre as social cachet after they've shuffled off, perhaps we should stop to appreciate and support the work of artists while they're still around to be helped by it. V

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