Welcome to your weekly edition of The Hollywood Outsider!
This is twodaymag's pop culture experiment featuring your humble contributor who knows nothing about pop culture!
This week the music world was forced to turn their annual self congratulatory celebration into a time of mourning as one of their own passed away. A woman so powerful they named a city in Texas after her, and gave that city an NFL team.
Why don't we slip into something more comfortable and discuss some headlines?
The Death of Whitney Houston
This is old news now, but since the Outsider cannot control the news cycle or the date he's published you're just going to have to deal with it.
Singer Whitney Elizabeth Houston passed away this week in a Los Angeles hotel room bathtub, and while there has been no official word yet, many believe the cause of death was Whitney Elizabeth Houston.
It was known to pretty much everybody that Houston has struggled with substance abuse for most of her adult life, so it wouldn't be a surprise to anyone if drugs played a role in her tragic and untimely demise.
While it is always sad to lose someone so talented in such a tragic way, it's interesting to see how people react.
When a prominent musician dies, you suddenly see a huge spike in their album sales. This always puzzled the Outsider; have these people not known Houston's work and want to see what the fuss was about, or is this some form of tribute?
Based on an unscientific poll on Facebook, most people appear to have bought her music posthumously as a tribute to show their "true fandom." But this puzzles the Outsider even more, if you were such a big fan of Houston's in the first place, would you not already own those albums?
Then you have the tributes from the celebrity world. Some, like the one from Aretha Franklin, were awesome. Dolly Parton took the opportunity to remind everybody that "I Will Always Love You" was actually her song (though the Outsider didn't even know that so he can't fault Parton). But perhaps the best and (possibly) dumbest tribute was given by legend Tony Bennett.
Bennett, famous for singing about a body part he left in San Francisco, found a way to make the event about himself. He got onstage and talked about celebrities we have lost recently; Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse and now Whitney Houston, all of which to drug abuse. According to Bennett, the way we can prevent this from happening is to simply legalize drugs.
Now the Outsider doesn't want to get into the merits of the legalize drugs debate, mostly because he's still trying to make his own mind up, but the argument put forth by Bennett - a long time supporter of legalization - is just stupid.
Winehouse apparently died of complications relating to alcohol, which is legal, and Michael Jackson died of mixing and overdosing drugs he had a prescription for, which is also legal. Finally, it is believed that Houston was also on various narcotics that she had obtained prescriptions for, again totally legal.
So what would legalizing drugs have done to save these three musicians? If you guessed "jack shit", you win! The only people in these cases that legalization would have saved are Jackson's and (possibly) Houston's doctors from manslaughter charges.
There is a real and solid argument to be made for the legalization of certain drugs, but for Bennett to hijack a tribute to the accomplishments of such a talented singer to make it about his virtually unrelated personal campaign is deplorable.
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Programming note: No column next week as the Outsider will be out of the country working on one of his extradition charges... Or vacation... Something like that.
twoday magazine wants to know: Do you think legalizing drugs would help or hurt those suffering from drug addiction? Let us know your thoughts on our Facebook page.
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