On July 20th, 2017, Chester Bennington committed suicide by hanging at age 41. He was the lead singer and frontman for Linkin Park, a largely metal/rap rock outfit. Linkin Park took these usually more alternative genres to a commercial friendly stage, topping billboard charts and gaining high music sale certifications across the globe.

Broadcasting your art so widely is a surefire way to gain mounds of criticism as well as praise. In many music circles, it has become hip to make fun of Linkin Park and their musical output because it is seen as shallow and one-dimensional compared to many other, less commercial, artists. This phenomena strikes many radio friendly musical artists, to the point where many are parroting the same words of others without ever listening to or knowing anything about the artist at hand.

This parroting is usually fairly harmless; after all, they're artists, held up on a pedestal where they're expected to be able to take all of it. When Linkin Park released their most recent album a few months back, "One More Light", they got more hate than ever before. Shifting from a metal to electropop theme proved entirely disastrous, as fans and critics alike slandered their efforts.

Soon after the release of "One More Light," Bennington killed himself. There can be multiple reasons cited why he performed the action, all valid in their own right. No matter the reason, the fact of the matter is that it happened, and you have to be respectful and thoughtful.

I agree, "One More Light" wasn't a very good record. This doesn't mean, however, that you have a free pass to make light of the suicide. I have witnessed many cases of individuals joking about how Bennington killed himself because "his music was so bad" or that it didn't matter or was funny because he "wasn't a good artist anyway".

Obviously, this isn't OK. Whether you like his music or not, to make fun of an individual like Bennington just because you think it's funny to make fun of his musical output is terribly unsettling and pushing all human instincts of empathy aside. Bennington's suicide shouldn't be unimportant just because some believe his music was sub-par at times. He was a human being just like the rest of us, with an entire life and thoughts and feelings of his own. His music doesn't make all that less valid, or something to poke fun at.

It's not necessarily separating art from the artist. It's more so just being a decent human being and respecting a death. Huge celebrities are only human too, an ideal that I feel many of us often forget and thus disregard our feelings for.