The last few weeks I've read some banter from him, ostensibly between him and the fans calling LP out for selling out due to their last album, between him and Corey Taylor etc...
I listened to Hybrid Theory, a friend in high school gave me a copy of the album, and I loved a few songs. I was just starting w metal at the time...
The thing that hurts more than I expected is that it took hearing that he offed himself to remind me how trivial our criticism of artists is. Shit, for all I know their latest album might have been absolute garbage by their fan standards - which, hey, most bands in the game long enough have had to deal with. But we, as fans and as human beings, should occasionally try to remember that these guys are also human beings too, with all the virtues and flaws we all inhabit...
I suppose it's hard to remember this every time an argument starts. And for all I know, he offed himself for reason(s) unrelated to fans, or other people in general. But it costs us so little to at least try and remember that...
The more somber thing that I keep thinking about is how we as a society, broadly speaking, keep attempting to squeeze suicides into neat little categories by characterizing them as stemming from substance abuse, mental illnesses, relationship problems etc. It's a nice little narrative, one meant to protect us from the more dangerous thoughts. Making a suicide out to be an abnormal event, an aberration, an anomaly... we protect ourselves from having to think about the possibility that it was a deliberate, sane choice, based on stone-cold facts and executed consciously and without interference. We make suicides wrong. But are they intrinsically wrong?
I've personally considered the idea many times, and have come out thinking I can always do it later if the going gets real bad, but who is to say that there's no such thing as a rational, well-reasoned thought process that logically leads to a suicide?
