Frustrated Greatness

I just finished watching a documentary on the life of Marvin Gaye. It was on WNED tonight. It aired right after a documentary on the life of another great musical artist from the same generation, Sam Cooke. I don't know if they were adjacent for a reason but they were both, in life and in death, similar. Both were incredibly talented. They both changed music and its trajectory. Their music was positively charged. Their songs have a way of just making you feel good if that's all they end up doing. Of course, their music stood for more than just that.

What's strangely coincidental is how they both met the same fate. Both were shot to death "before their time". Isn't that a great turn of phrase? "Before their time?" There really is no such thing but that's not the point I'm interested in making tonight. What struck me as tragic and profound was their level of greatness from a talent perspective. Both Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye were seriously talented. Just listen to their music. Yet both left this world laying on the ground as their life slowly slipped away.

Sam Cooke met his fate at the hands of a landlord. He was in her building, it may have been a hotel, with a prostitute that he had met that night at a bar. Whether he knew she was a prostitute or not I'm not sure. It doesn't matter. She ended up with him at this place. The story goes that she attempted to steal his pants which had a lot of cash in the pockets. He ran out of the room and hunted down the landlord because he felt she was involved in the shakedown. One thing led to another and Sam Cooke was shot.

Marvin Gaye was a troubled man. He grew up with a father who was both a Pentecostal preacher and a cross dresser. I guess he struggled with the spiritual and secular duality of life and never did quite figure out how to reconcile it all. He had serious drug addiction. His story goes that one night at his parents house he was defending his mother against his father in an argument. His father grabbed a gun that Marvin had purchased for him some time before. What happened next has already been revealed. Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his own father with his own gun.

I guess the idealist in me wants to try to take something away from all of this. I want to find the moral of the story, the lesson to be learned. I suppose there are a few things to appreciate here. What stands out to me is the tragedy of unrealized greatness. Even despite all of their achievements and the trappings of success they couldn't escape sad and tragic deaths. Now I'm no Marvin Gaye or Sam Cooke but it's hard not to think of myself in their place. It's easy to think that we're exempt from those kinds of events and troubles but neither of them planned to leave this world the way they did. Neither wrote that in a five year plan. Certainly they made choices that led them to those places but we're making choices everyday that could just as easily go sour. What's preventing us from making one bad choice that turns into a slightly worse choice that turns into our last choice?

I'm not trying to be over-dramatic. I just think it's healthy to realize that our actions aren't exempt from consequences. Those tragedies that we see and pity people for could easily be us one day. To be safe, I put my faith in Christ. If there truly is any remedy or precaution then surely he is it.