A couple of weeks ago, a famous R&B star died in a plan crash along with eight other people. You may have heard of her, she was Tricky's first choice to sing lead on his "Broken Homes" single, but she wasn't able to do it so he had to get PJ Harvey instead. Hopefully, enough time has passed to allow people to return to thinking rationally about her career and the manner of her death. With regard to the former, she is experiencing a post-mortem canonization similar to the case of Jeff Buckley. As with Buckley, she was certainly a considerable talent but hardly a top level star. She was nowhere near the level of popularity of Mary J. Blige or Toni Braxton, nowhere near as beautiful as Destiny's Child, and nowhere near as outragious as Li'l Kim, although she seems to have become all of those things since she died.

And her death was not a tragedy. I've been waiting to write this piece for two weeks, waiting to hear facts from the crash investigation. Now that I have, I can declare it to be a preposterously dumb error in judgement by arrogant music industry people. We've learned that the plane had been booked for five passengers, because that was the maximum number it could safely transport. Eight people showed up for boarding. Thus, the plane became "substantially overloaded". Otherwise, it was in perfect mechanical condition before takeoff. Except that the plane itself was not registered to operate commercial charter flights in the Bahamas.

If these findings hold true, then the decision to board the plane was equally stupid and asinine as eight teenagers packing into a stolen five person car and joyriding down the highway. The deaths are sad, very very sad, but people who die as a result of their own piss-poor judgement are not worthy of the word "tragedy" to describe their actions. For example, JFK Jr.'s death was not a tragedy either, no matter how many tribute issues are devoted to it by People magazine. John John was a spoiled arrogant playboy who had absolutely no business flying that plane under those conditions, with a foot injury and with his limited flying experience. His passengers are less to blame, but no more so than people who willingly get into a car with an obviously drunk driver. Tragedies should describe instances in which people die through absolutely no fault of their own, just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Eight people dying and hundreds more sick in Walkerton, Ontario as the result of E.coli poisoning because the local officials didn't even know what bacteria were -- that's a tragedy. Fourteen people getting blown up in downtown Jerusalem because they dared to have pizza for lunch -- that's a tragedy. A bunch of music industry types piling themselves and their hordes of luggage into a tiny unregistered plane is not a tragedy, it's just a dumb mistake on the part of many, many people. Let's not candy coat it, let's say what really happened. People educate their children to recognize dangerous situations. Such education is always simple and direct: don't use drugs, don't carry guns, don't drink and drive, and if you know somebody who is, stop and tell somebody about it. Unfortunately, people still die by these methods, but if there is a positive side, sometimes it takes a persons' death to make people realise how wrong they were when they died. But only if they truly understand why that person died in the first place. RIP.