| We generally avoid eulogies here at Last Plane to Jakarta;
the eleventh of September came and went and we resisted the impulse
(evidently irresistible to every other website in the known universe)
to write a long ponderous column giving our two cents’ worth,
and while we were sad to hear that George Harrison had left the planet,
it wasn’t like anybody needed an extra thousand words from us
establishing Harrison’s position in the rock pantheon. But Chuck
Schuldiner is different. He’s different because he wasn’t
just an innovator but a visionary, almost singlehandedly birthing
an entire genre. He’s different because his lower public visibility
and the nature of his work makes for lots of plain talk and a lot
less malarkey in discussions of his illness and his death, both from
Schuldiner himself and from people talking about him. He’s different,
finally, because he died broke, and desperate, never losing hope that
he’d get help before time ran out, which it finally did. Those
of us fortunate enough to have caught wind of his wildly creative
nature have been taking the loss pretty hard. |
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