Celebrity Death Thread

[DanO]

That was posted Gonz.

GO LIONS "11" !

[-Deborah-]

Naw I posted when he was on life support. They took him off.

Sad how his life turned out. Hope things go better for him in the next one.

[nhwbrooklyn]

Musician Gil Scott-Heron, who helped lay the groundwork for rap by fusing minimalistic percussion, political expression and spoken-word poetry on songs such as "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," died Friday at age 62.
A friend, Doris C. Nolan, who answered the telephone listed for his Manhattan recording company, said he died in the afternoon at St. Luke's Hospital after becoming sick upon returning from a European trip.
"We're all sort of shattered," she said.
Scott-Heron's influence on rap was such that he sometimes was referred to as the Godfather of Rap, a title he rejected.
"If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating `hooks,' which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of poems, "Now and Then."
He referred to his signature mix of percussion, politics and performed poetry as bluesology or Third World music. But then he said it was simply "black music or black American music."
"Because Black Americans are now a tremendously diverse essence of all the places we've come from and the music and rhythms we brought with us," he wrote.
Nevertheless, his influence on generations of rappers has been demonstrated through sampling of his recordings by artists, including Kanye West.
Scott-Heron recorded the song that would make him famous, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," which critiqued mass media, for the album "125th and Lenox" in Harlem in the 1970s. He followed up that recording with more than a dozen albums, initially collaborating with musician Brian Jackson. His most recent album was "I'm New Here," which he began recording in 2007 and was released in 2010.
Throughout his musical career, he took on political issues of his time, including apartheid in South Africa and nuclear arms. He had been shaped by the politics of the 1960s and the black literature, especially of the Harlem Renaissance.
Scott-Heron was born in Chicago on April 1, 1949. He was raised in Jackson, Tenn., and in New York before attending college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Before turning to music, he was a novelist, at age 19, with the publication of "The Vulture," a murder mystery.
He also was the author of "The Nigger Factory," a social satire.

That totally sucks.

His latest album "I'm New Here" is good.

[nhwbrooklyn]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV_astp3BjM"]YouTube - ‪Gil Scott-Heron - 'I'm New Here' (official video)‬‏[/ame]

[bimmer84]

Jack Kevorkian

http://www.freep.com/article/2011060...text|FRONTPAGE

[DanO]

RIP Jack.

GO LIONS "11" !

[Islair]

RIP Jack

I didn't have any problems with your views.












(looks over shoulder for the Hand of Deb ready to strike me down......politics you know)

[Tony G]

Sort of a fraud wasn't he though? When it came his time he fought and didn't want to go. I don't have a real issue with his views, I'm just surprised he didn't hook up the machine one more time.

[SeattleLionsFan]

He never said people shouldn't try to live. Just that they should be able to end it when they wanted to.

[Islair]

Some of his patients were really suffering....with zero percent chance of recovery. If I were in their shoes and I had two options a) call Jack or b) spend the next 6 months oozing into my bed sheets with a morphine drip, I would have called Jack.

I could never even imagine trying to fight on like that. Out of all the things in the world, ending up in hospice care, knowing the end is near, but the credits haven't rolled yet because you havent suffered enough. That would be awful.

[The Cat]

James Arness, star of Gunsmoke, gone at 88. The finest tv series of its day.

[DanO]

Loved that show.

Rip James.

GO LIONS "11" !

[bimmer84]

Great show. RIP James.

[LionsFanInJapan]

Loved that show.

Rip James.

GO LIONS "11" !

Me too. RIP Mr. Arness.

[Tony G]

Ex-Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger dies

http://www.freep.com/article/20110604/NEWS15/110604014/Ex-Secretary-State-Lawrence-Eagleburger-dies?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE