It’s not like we were having regular phone calls with Whitney, or meeting her in town for a gin and tonic, or taking her to the cinema to see the latest Harry Potter, but still, when we heard, something inside went a bit funny.
This is the weird thing about a celebrity dying. For most of us, we’ll never have any direct interaction with them, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t affect our lives.
We won’t pretend that Whitney was one of our favourite performers, but we respect what she did, know pretty much all her songs, and can recall several of her high profile escapades.
Who can forget Kevin Costner sexily slicing a silk scarf on a sword in order to win Whitney’s heart in 'The Bodyguard', or her tear inducingly perfect rendition of ‘One Moment In Time’ at the Grammys, or when she elegantly flipped off the advances of a drunk Serge Gainsbourg on live tv, or even when her bra popped out on X Factor.
When somebody you know dies there’s an inexplicable feeling of loss. A part of the world as you understand it disappears, and you know that there’s nothing that anybody can do to bring it back.
In today's society celebrities are familiar to us. We’re exposed to their day to day antics (whether we like it or not - thank you ‘the press’) as a companion to their talent. As a result, it’s easy to feel some identification with them, and you can’t help but feel a similar (albeit muted) sense of loss when they are taken away.
Now, we’re not trying to claim Whitney was some kind of philosophical enigma whom Heidegger might have studied. We just wanted to say something about why we feel a bit odd today about a 48 year old woman (on the other side of the world whom we never met) dying. We tried to express it through the medium of cake, but there was a disaster with the icing. So this will have to do.
Whitney, you’ll be missed. We might not fully understand why, but that’s the mystery of life and we’re just a blog about music.
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