Famed television host and "world's oldest teenager" Dick Clark has passed away at age 82, due to a massive heart attack. The longtime host of American Bandstand and ABC's New Year's Rockin' Eve lived a storied life, introducing millions of kids to pop music, while also hosting various game shows on network TV and syndication.
A celebrity death in 2012 wouldn't be real unless a gaggle of kids -- and some adults -- immediately went on Twitter and asked who the dead person was, what they did, and we should care they are dead. In fact, I think the true barometer for how much you meant to the world at large is directly correlated to how many teens don't know who the fuck you are on the Internet.
Here is a Twitter feed of people asking who he is.
Should we let this one slide, though? Clark has been away from the greater public eye since the mid-'00s after his stroke, meaning that to a lot of these kids he's just another face in the crowd of old rich white dudes.
I mean shit, y'all, it's not like Ryan Seacrest died. There is a commentary to be made here about two Americas, the fall of society, the blah blah blah...let's just all agree that people are dumb. Rill dumm.
Lately it seems that whenever over 50 in pop-culture passes away, it's met with a collective "meh" by most of the very vocal Twitter peanut gallery. If I am clueless whenever I see an alert that someone has died come over the wires, I always Google the name to see who they were.
I don't just scream in the middle of virtual crowd that I am ignorant and lack basic Internet search skills and expect the knowledge to be handed to me.
When the day comes that Bob Dylan shuffles and mumbles to the great beyond, you will be able to find me in fetal position under my desk, sobbing. Not because the world lost a genius, but because a freshman in college asked who the old bastard with the gray Afro was.
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