Watched a guy in Nashville argue Merle Haggard was overhyped and it made me rethink how I rate dead legends
I was at a bar off Broadway a few months back and some dude started going off about how Haggard gets way more credit than he deserves, just cause he died and everyone wants to act like they were always fans. At first I thought he was just trying to get a rise out of people, but then he asked the whole table to name three Haggard songs without googling, and only one person could. That got me thinking about how we do this with every dead legend, we treat dying like it upgrades the catalog. Has anyone else had a moment where a random stranger made them question a whole artist they thought they loved?
Learned this the hard way with a buddy who swore he was the biggest Prince fan alive. Asked him to name one album track that wasn't a single and he went quiet. Same thing happens with Bowie, with Petty, with anyone who dies. People mourn the idea of them more than the actual work. My advice is pick five songs from any dead legend you claim to love and see if you actually know them or just know the hits. If you can't get past the radio stuff, that's fine, just don't act like you lost a family member. Grief is real but so is faking it, and the bar test catches both.