Adaeze ElechiBelieve it or not, I only just heard about Jeff Buckley. Last weekend, a friend told me about his life and death in the same breath. In a matter of seconds, I was filled with excitement and hope at the thought that there might still be talented young musicians today who make honest, meaningful, and stunning music; then it was as though the ground was ripped from under my feet when I heard he’d died in the late nineties. Normally, learning about a previously unknown musician’s life and death wouldn’t have affected me as much as it did, but as my friend talked about Buckley’s drowning in Memphis, Tennessee’s Wolf River Marina, and as my ears and heart filled up with Buckley’s sorrow-stained voice belting “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over ” through the speakers, I caught a vision of myself turning on the radio and being assaulted by today’s popular songs (like Ke$ha’s “Blah Blah Blah”). It was enough to make me weep.

Bio: Adaeze Elechi is Guernica’s blog editor. Read her last recommendation of the miniseries White Teeth “here”:https://guernicamag.com/blog/1671/rec_room_adaeze_elechi_white_t/.

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