On the night Michael Jackson died almost a year ago, it felt as if the internet was going to fall over. TMZ was suddenly the centre of the web universe as the news itself was broken on the celebrity site, while Twitter was battling through a distinctly wobbly moment as fans around the world tried to tweet their anguish, comment or tribute (or joke).
To say Jackson’s demise was the first celebrity social media death would be wide of the mark – simply, his death was the first of its kind in over a decade. In those 10+ years the internet has changed rather a lot, so Jackson’s death was a first. It was unique. It will, probably, be a long time before anything like it happens to the social web again.
Sadly, late 2009 and all over 2010 so far has been a particularly sorrowful one for heavy metal fans like myself. In December, Avenged Sevenfold drummer, vocalist and songwriter Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan was found dead at his home. Pete Steele of Type O Negative passed away in April and then Ronnie James Dio, a true giant of the genre, died of stomach cancer a month later.
Most recently, Paul Gray (pictured) was found dead in a hotel room in Des Moines, Iowa. Known as #2 in the metal outfit Slipknot, Gray was a talented musician in a band that has long since matured beyond its unfair reputation. His loss, so soon after Dio, has shocked the metal community. I found out – inevitably – through Twitter.
This post won’t reveal anything new or unexpected, but I wanted to jot down some thoughts about the extra dimension added to these stories by social media.
The most famous day
It’s often said that artists don’t get the recognition they deserve until they’re gone. It will come as no surprise that search statistics appear to bear this out.
The graphic above shows search volume for ‘Pete Steele’, ‘Ronnie James Dio’ and ‘Paul Gray’ over the last three full months. The peaks tell their own story: the day on which celebrities are most famous is the day they die.
I had a quick chat with Kerry about this, to see if there might be anything more to it, and she made an interesting point. Perhaps it’s not simply a case of the interest in a person being highest when they die, but a culmination of all the different people interested in him/her for different reasons coming together on one particular day.
She gave the example of Gary Coleman, the former child actor who also died recently. One person might remember him fondly from the cast of Diff’rent Strokes, while another knows him from cameos in more recent shows like The Simpsons. Both might search for him over time, but the only time at which they’re likely to search on the same day is when he passes away.
Paul Gray and Jimmy Sullivan provide added twists on this theme. Slipknot are famous for masks, anonymity and a sense of theatre. Some members like Joey Jordison, Corey Taylor and Jim Root are very recognisable faces outside the band, but within Slipknot every member is just a number within a unit (Gray was #2). Interest in Paul Gray the man, the person beyond Slipknot, only comes into play in the event of a tragedy. The same goes for Sullivan, The Rev to fans of A7X.
Spreading the news
As I mentioned, I first learned of the death of Paul Gray via Twitter – I expect many people found out in a similar way. When a famous person dies in 2010, the rumours begin to circulate online before the news is confirmed. When confirmation has been made, tweets like this one, reporting the news, are commonplace. Similarly, the news spreads through tribute tweets like this.
Both types of tweet are seen and retweeted, and the news spreads. I found out about Gray through someone I follow on Twitter but wouldn’t have known I was a Slipnot fan. The same will have happened for some of my followers when I tweeted about it.
Official/peer tributes
Tributes are pouring in. This used to mean that fellow celebrities were queuing up to give their opinions on news bulletins or tribute specials on television or radio. Today, they begin as soon as a widely felt loss is confirmed. Members of Stone Sour, a popular side project of Slipknot duo Taylor and Root (albeit one that pre-dates Slipknot) posted a tribute message to Gray on their MySpace blog, sparking similar reactions in the comments section.
In the days after the deaths of The Rev, Steele, Dio and Gray, my music feeds in Google Reader were absolutely flooded by tributes from fellow musicians, bandmates and journalists. The volume of peer-level grief was astonishing.
The day after Gray’s death, Slipknot lined up for an emotional press conference. This has been made available by many sources on YouTube and has amassed hundreds of thousands of views in a little over a week. It mightn’t sound much if you’ve grown up hearing about television audiences of millions, but Paul Gray’s death probably wouldn’t ever have been deemed worthy of prime-time mainstream exposure.
Days later, Slipknot released a 10-minute tribute video to their fallen bassist, also available on YouTube. At the time of writing, that video is a couple of thousand short of 350,000 views.
User-generated tributes
Inevitably, fans feel the loss of a star they admire almost as keenly as those closer to the real person and produce tributes of their own. YouTube is already the home of Ronnie James Dio tribute videos, Paul Gray tribute videos and Pete Steele tribute videos.
Bloggers have also written tributes, for example Horns Up Rocks‘ piece or Evan Dashevsky’s post dedicated to Steele, or countless blog posts written in tribute to Dio.
Citizen journalism?
Of course, here I mean the documenting of events rather than journalism in its purest sense. At Dio’s funeral, and public memorial service, a large number of official and unofficial videos were captured. The people creating this content might have been called citizen journalists in months past, but in truth they are simply gathering documentary evidence of the mourning and grieving of a significant individual.
In a way it is a contribution made to documentary history that results from every blog post and every tribute video too. Times haven’t changed completely – we still feel the effects of the deaths of people we admire, only now we can create content to express as much and have other people read or see it. More importantly, it adds to the pile of user-generated content that will become an important part of the history of the person we’re paying tribute to.
I don’t mean to be overly morbid, but death is more fundamental a concept than almost any other and yet in some cases it is possible for social media to have some effect on the experiences that result from it. If you’re famous enough, social media will help shape and amplify the public reaction to and recording of your death. I think that’s pretty impressive.
news consumption, Twitter
