Commentary

Let me start off by saying that this past week has been shitty.

What with Dante’s 7th circle of hell unleashing on the economy, David Foster Wallace’s suicide (rest in peace), and the death of my own beloved iPod (may you also rest in peace), the world just seems to be constantly falling apart these days. It is on times like these where I turn my back to the news and the idiosyncrasies of our society, and quite urgently submerge myself in the one thing that always makes me happy…music.

So on Tuesday night, that is exactly what I did. I closed out of the myriad articles on my desktop regarding the death of our economy, and began plotting my escape. “Who is it going to be today?” I thought, and almost immediately it dawned on me. The Secret Machines. That’s who it was going to be. And so I turned on Now Here is Nowhere and decided to catch up on the psychedelic trio.

Their website loaded and to my dismay, I found myself face to face with this:

September 16, 2008

It’s a sad day. For a few short moments during 2005’s Live 8, we saw Pink Floyd together and hoped. We wondered about the money they might make, the songs they might play, how many shows we might be able to make it to see. Could Roger mend fences with the band that made him great? Would David allow this to happen? We knew they were not getting any younger, I wonder if they did? I wonder what it feels like to have that great big wonderful door closed forever. I am sorry for Mr. Wright’s family and friends. And I am sorry for us, too.

Brandon Curtis
The Secret Machines

My immediate reaction was confusion. From the first couple of lines, I deduced that someone had died but I did not know who.

From confusion my emotions shifted directly to sadness. Why? Why on earth did this have to happen? Pink Floyd was the one band that still had all of its original members (with the exception of the late Syd Barrett) and somewhere very deep in my heart I still thought that maybe, just maybe I would one day see them. My father and I have long talked of the day where we would finally experience a Floyd show; it was far-fetched, but still possible, still within the realm of reality and that gave me hope.

And now, here it was, the dream of all dreams, crushed into a myriad of pieces on my hardwood floor, never to return. So I sat, affixed on the screen of my computer, and the sudden wave of depression that had momentarily subsided was back again, re-energized and ready to make my life very miserable.

What followed was rather strange. I have never lost a person (not anyone close to me anyway) and so grief is an unknown concept to me. I am not familiar with its phases nor do I ever hope to be (even though its role in my life is inevitable). Suddenly, the date of the post attracted my attention.

The 16th? How could that be? It was the 17th and there was no way that I possibly went an entire day without knowing of Rick Wright’s death. No way. So I Googled it. And what a nasty shock it was to find out that he had actually passed away on the 15th!

This was a serious offense.

How in the world did no one manage to inform me that the keyboardist of one the greatest bands that ever existed had died? How is it that my friends weren’t texting me, or hadn’t texted me? And furthermore, how is it that I checked my email and thereby checked the Yahoo homepage and did not see one headline that read “Rick Wright dies at 65″?

So I quickly typed in Yahoo and surveyed the homepage. Not one article. Not in the headlines at least. Instead I found an article about Miley Cyrus and her escapades, an entire article speculating about her boyfriends, for God’s sake.

What the hell is wrong with the world? Why is society so fixated on a 15 year old brat? Did they not know who had recently passed away?!

I swear, sometimes, I really question my place in this generation.

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