Homage to Keith Flint
Paying homage to Keith Flint and considering his tragic death in March 2019.
On Monday, March 4, 2019 a news bulletin hit the wire, started to pop up on notifications, trend on social media platforms. The kind of bulletin that, though dwarfed by big political events or natural disasters, can pierce the emotional armour of its reader acutely.
Keith Flint, frontman and dancer for Prodigy, the longtime British dance act, was dead at age 49—by suicide.
Artists and admired public figures die frequently, but for most that hear of their deaths, they are outside the spheres of personal influence and real emotional connection. Sometimes, though, a select group of public figures hold a deep place in our hearts. Perhaps they were closely associated with a formative period in our lives, or their work, thoughts, or way of being inspired or defined a path forwards in life that ended up forming an important part of our identities.
Keith Flint was one of those public figures to me, whose death had the ability to strike on an emotional level. His death coming by suicide hit, too: though after a string of revered public figures dying unexpectedly by self-inflicted means in recent years—Philip Seymour Hoffman (2014), Robin Williams (2014), and Anthony Bourdain (2018) come to mind without pause for thought—, maybe it shouldn’t have.