I’m sad and I don’t even know why. If I started rattling off my favorite singers it would probably take me a long time to get to Whitney, just because she was never huge on my radar. I was a teenager when the VH-1 Divas Live thing came around, and there was no doubt Whitney has the “it.” Listening back to all the tracks currently flooding my Facebook stream makes me go, “I love that Whitney song! Oh yeah, THAT one too!” It’s a nostalgia trip and humans are good at nothing if not reminiscing. “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” takes me back to rocking out on a Casio keyboard in my room. Those were the days. It dulls the tragic aspects of the situation a little to go back all the way to the good stuff.

People ask me sometimes about wanting to be “famous.” In my hometown, the music industry is exactly what we see on TV. You either get famous or you go home and make it a hobby. I’m not totally sure what people think I am doing since I am obviously not “famous” and yet am seemingly repellent to finding a “real job.” Texas has proven that there is a rich industry of people making a living in music that rely neither on fame or on playing covers in the corners of Mexican restaurants, and I am grateful I found it.

There are so many better written articles about the Machine of Fame in this country than what I can squeeze out in a blog post…about how we the public create our fame martyrs to entertain us for a while until we knock them down and leave them for dead. I read an article that made the point that at some juncture the powers that be in the music industry make the decision to keep you alive or let you die based on how much money you could make them in each scenario. A bit conspiracy laden, for sure…there aren’t death panels in the basement of Warner Records or whatever, deciding who gets another album and tour and who gets a cocaine supplier…but it’s interesting that Sony Records raised the price of Ms. Houston’s digital albums hours after her death.

So we all feel bad and we post tributes and Facebook notes for the people who, before the breaking news on Twitter of their passing, we considered washed up tabloid fodder or tragic gossip blog entertainment. The tributes are heartfelt, but they come from a place of guilt as much as anything. We feed the machine and then we hold memorials when the machine spits out our fallen idols and starts chewing up the next round.

Morbid? Yep. I feed the machine too…I’m a guilty party.  The game will continue to get played regardless of who participates.  The Enquirer is not in danger of folding any time soon.

The best I can think to do right now is repeat the mantra “garbage in, garbage out.”  Take in the good stuff and reject the bad.  So now I’m gonna go jam out to “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.”