The Heartbreaking Wisdom of Frances Bean Cobain

All right, so to catch everyone up to speed, singer Lana Del Rey recently made some unfortunate comments (I mean, throw a stone and you’ll find a celebrity making an unfortunate comment) in which she romanticized the untimely deaths of her favorite singers Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and mused about meeting a similar fate, as in, she said straight-out “I wish I was dead already.” She later recanted her statements.

Del Rey’s upsetting sentiment did not go over well on Twitter. The Internet talked back (as the Internet does) and one of the best responses came from Frances Bean Cobain, Kurt Cobain’s daughter, who never knew her father because his life was cut so tragically short.

Initially Frances Bean (@alka_seltzer666) posted the following series of tweets:

“I’ll never know my father because he died young, and it becomes a desirable feat because people like you think it’s ‘cool.’ Well, it’s f***ing not. Embrace life, because you only get one life. The people you mentioned wasted that life. Don’t be one of those people. You’re too talented to waste it away.”

She has since deleted those tweets and left the following tweet up in its place:

“I’m not attacking anyone. I have no animosity towards Lana, I was just trying to put things in perspective from a personal experience.”

I completely understand why Frances Bean felt the pressure to delete her initial strongly-worded tweets (the Internet is a hard place to have an opinion, and detractors and haters are legion), but I can’t help wishing she had left her words up for all to see. She’s absolutely in the right here. Lana Del Rey isn’t the only person romanticizing these deaths.

Glamorizing the suicides and overdoses of musicians has become “a thing” when it absolutely should NOT be. There is no shortage of celebrity biopics, YouTube tributes, and RIP T-Shirts mythologizing those who passed too soon, without examining the consequences of their passing. All too often, we forget the real, hard and fast ramifications of loss, the holes in the hearts of the loved ones left behind.

Frances Bean’s comments are a reminder of the real-world effects of these tragic actions. Her truth is a powerful one. Her loss is heartbreaking and, clearly, still takes a toll on her life. Sometimes we all need some perspective on our relationship to celebrity culture and Cobain’s daughter was exactly the right person to distribute the wake-up call.