Musicians we lost in 2018 so far.

Back in the 1980s, there was that movie (and the TV show it was based on) called Fame. The film’s theme song, also called “Fame,” was written from the perspective of a young, budding performer like those depicted on-screen, proclaiming that she was “gonna live forever.” Now, nobody was suggesting that fame would literally make anyone immortal and no longer subject to the one steadfast rule of being human (that death will come one day). Rather, “Fame” (and its singer, Irene Cara) metaphorically and accurately pointed out that artistic achievement does actually, in a way, allow a person to live forever.
Those talented individuals who make artistic contributions to the world, the kind of people who share their amazing abilities with the rest of us, never fully die because their work persists through time, delighting and inspiring others for years on end. Here are some people for whom the theme song from Fame tragically applies. These musicians of various genres shed their mortal coil in 2018, but their compositions, performances, and works of brilliance will probably outlive all of us.
Ray Thomas
For 50-ish years now, teens have loved grooving to spacey prog-rock on headphones while sitting on beanbag chairs, staring at lava lamps, and thinking about space, time, and the nature of life itself, man. They couldn’t have done it without arguably the proggiest of all prog bands, the Moody Blues, and that band wouldn’t have existed without Ray Thomas. He founded the first incarnation of the band in 1964 and was one of its first singers. As the band evolved and adopted its classic lineup that included singer Justin Hayward, Thomas switched roles slightly to become one of the few and certainly one of the best flute players in rock ‘n’ roll history.
Thomas’ work is all over iconic Moody Blues stuff like
Days of Future Passed and “Nights in White Satin,” and he still sang on occasion, particularly on songs he wrote, such as “Twilight Time” and “Legend of the Mind.” Thomas retired from the band in 2002, and announced he had prostate cancer in 2013. On January 4, he died at his home in Surrey at age 76, just three months before his band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Fast Eddie Clarke
Clarke earned his nickname — he was a lightning-quick guitarist who teamed with Motörhead singer Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister to create propulsive, bewildering, chaotic, drugged-out, grimy, dirty, working class rock ‘n’ roll — in other words, metal. Clarke joined the legendary British band in 1976 and played on many albums with the group, which wound up being the band’s most well-received, including the self-titled Motörhead, along with
Overkill, Bomber, and Ace of Spades. Fast Eddie was the last surviving member of that classic Motörhead lineup, with drummer Phil Taylor having died in 2015, and Lemmy following suit not long after.
In 1982, Clarke left Motörhead and formed the hard rock band Fastway, probably best known for the 1983 rock radio hit “Say What You Will.” But while you can take the boy out of Motörhead, you can’t take the Motörhead out of the boy. “The best years of my life were in Motörhead,” Clarke told Antihero Magazine in 2016. He died on January 10 in a London hospital at age 67 while being treated for pneumonia.
Dolores O’Riordan
Amidst all the angst and macho-posturing often present in early 1990s grunge and alternative rock, the Cranberries offered something different: alternately exuberant and melancholy pop with a traditionally Irish-inspired through-line. Much of that came from the unforgettable and haunting voice of the band’s lead singer, Dolores O’Riordan . Born in Limerick, Ireland, she joined the group formerly known as the Cranberry Saw Us when she answered an ad looking for a female singer. She got the gig, of course, because of her beautiful, clear, and versatile voice, propelling songs like “Linger,” “Zombie,” and “When You’re Gone” to international hit status. (That’s to say nothing of “Dreams,” which has been used in approximately every movie trailer produced since the song was a hit in 1994.) She had to cancel some Cranberries tour dates and take most of 2017 off because of back issues, but when O’Riordan was found deceased in her London hotel room on January 15, 2018, it was still quite a shock, as she was a mere 46 years old.
Lari White
In 1988, 23-year-old singer-songwriter Lari White moved to Nashville to become a star, and she found success almost instantly, winning the Nashville Network’s proto- American Idol talent contest You Can Be a Star. Not quite a star performer yet, White found work as a songwriter for a major Nashville publisher, penning tunes for major acts like Shelby Lynne and Tammy Wynette. It wasn’t until 1993 that White got a chance to take the spotlight, and she did quite well, racking up a half dozen country music hits including Top 10 smashes like “That’s My Baby,” “Now I Know,” and “That’s How You Know (When You’re in Love).” After her performing career started to fade a bit, White returned behind the scenes, producing songs for Toby Keith and others while also getting into acting. Remember at the end of Cast Away, when Tom Hanks finally delivers that unopened FedEx package adorned with angel wings to Texas and meets its recipient, a truck-driving red-headed lady named Bettina Peterson? That’s Lari White. She passed away January 23 from a rare form of cancer at the age of 52.
Hugh Masekela
Trumpet and flugelhorn player Hugh Masekela is regarded as the “Father of South African jazz,” deftly combining the coolness and crispness of American jazz with the depth and flavor of different musical styles of his home country and continent. He’s also one of the first stars of “world music,” a ridiculously broad and self-centered term often used by Europeans and North Americans to describe all music that didn’t originate in Europe or North America. But still, Masekela’s impact can’t be understated. In 1959, his group the Jazz Epistles recorded Jazz Epistle Verse 1, the first album
ever by a South African jazz band.
A year later, his outspoken stance on South Africa’s racist apartheid system got him exiled from the country, so he lived most of his life in Botswana and the United States, where he improbably spent three weeks at No. 1 on the pop chart in 1967 with “Grazing in the Grass,” a laidback jazz instrumental. That marked one of the very few times in pop music history that a non-European or non-American act was at the top of the pops. Masekela also played with Graceland- era, “world music”-embracing Paul Simon in the late ’80s. The jazz legend and political figure was 78 when he died on January 23, 2018.
Mark E. Smith
Popular music broke wide open in the 1970s, with an excitingly large variety of styles competing for public attention, from punk to New Wave to dance music to reggae to the stark and free-form genre called “post punk.” Which one of these would be the sound of the 1980s? Judging by the music left behind by Mark E. Smith, all of them, if he’d had his way. The Manchester-born Smith formed his band The Fall in 1978, and for 40 years it was his vehicle to try whatever musical flight of fancy captured his attention. While his lyrics often boasted wit, wordplay, and complex concepts, the music varied greatly, combining elements of punk, dance, garage rock, reggae, and more. The Fall released 32 albums, and while they never had a hit single, per se, they were hugely influential, laying the groundwork for the thoughtful dance music of the ’80s and beyond, and the era-defining alternative rock of the ’90s. Smith was 60 years old, and he passed away quietly (for once) at home on January 24, 2018.
Dennis Edwards
It can’t be easy joining a band after it has already had major success and after its beloved stars have left. It’s almost always a no-win situation to fill those very big shoes while also leading the group into new and successful territory. But this story isn’t always of the “Gary Cherone of Van Halen” variety, because there are also musicians like Dennis Edwards .
After the Temptations delighted millions of fans throughout the 1960s with perfect pop songs like “My Girl” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” lead singer David Ruffin left the group in 1968, and Edwards had the seemingly thankless job of replacing him. (The Temptations didn’t look far too find their guy — Edwards was a member of The Contours , a Temptations-esque group that had opened for the Temptations on tour.) However, this was right when the band was heading into its weird, psychedelic-funk phase, and Edwards was the right guy to hold the audience’s hand on innovative, future-thinking songs like “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone.” Edwards was part of the Temptations off and on until 1989 — the year the act entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and had a solo hit in 1984 with “Don’t Look Any Further.” According to Edwards’ wife, the unlikely pop icon passed away from complications of meningitis on February 1, 2018, just two days shy of his 75th birthday.
Lovebug Starski
Also known as Little Starsky, Lovebug Starski was present and active for one of the most creatively explosive times/places in music history: the Bronx in the late 1970s, and the birth of hip-hop. While not as well known as contemporaries like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, Starski helped popularize the genre of speaking-in-rhythm-to-funky-backing tracks. While still in his teens, Starski was both an MC and also a DJ, performing and leading parties at clubs and releasing early hip-hop singles like “Gangster Rock” and “Dancin’ Party People.”
The man’s most enduring contribution to hip-hop, however, is probably that he coined the term “hip-hop.”
According to NPR , Starski was anchoring a party for a friend who was about to ship out for military service and he teased the guy, pretending to be a drill sergeant ordering him to march: “hip, hop, hip, hop,” etc. Keith Cowboy, part of the Furious Five (as in Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five) was there, too, and he and Starski turned it into a call-and-response — Starski would say “hip,” and Keith Cowboy would say “hop.” Before long, Starski used a chant he derived from that exchange to get crowds worked up, which went something like, “hip, hop, hippy to the hippy hop-bop.” That was interpolated by the Sugarhill Gang in “Rapper’s Delight,” the first major hip-hop hit … which gave the music and its culture its name. Lovebug Starski died on February 8 at the age of 57.
Vic Damone
Damone was one of the last surviving members of those mid-20th-century Italian-American crooners loved by your grandparents and whoever lazily programs the music at the Olive Garden. Like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Jack Jones, Damone’s joyful, smooth, and professional baritone made plenty of entries in the Great American Songbook into lounge singer standards. Damone had a few “signature” tunes, such as the theme song from the movie An Affair to Remember, “You’re Breaking My Heart,” and “On the Street Where You Live.” Was Damone something of a poor man’s Frank Sinatra? Sure, and in a 1992 interview with Newsday (via USA Today) , he admitted as much.
“I decided that if I could sound like Frank maybe I did have a chance,” he said. “I was singing his words, breathing his breaths, (doing) his interpretation, with the high notes, the synergy.”
Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t seem to mind — Sinatra once said Damone boasted “the best pair of pipes in the business.” The reliable and entertaining Damone, 89, died on February 11 from complications of a respiratory illness at a Miami Beach hospital.
Daryle Singletary
Thanks to musicians like Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks, country music boomed in popularity in the early 1990s. The wave helped all ships to rise. Even the less slickly produced, more traditional country guys like George Strait and Randy Travis got a visibility boost, and the doors were opened for new singers of that ilk, such as Daryle Singletary. While he made do playing bars in Nashville, Singletary’s demo for a song called “An Old Pair of Shoes” caught the attention of Travis, and his then-wife Elizabeth jumped at the chance to manage the young singer. Randy Travis produced Singletary’s self-titled debut album, which included big country hits like “Too Much Fun” and “I Let Her Lie.” He had a few more hit singles, then settled into a neo-traditionalist style. In 2017, he teamed up with singer Rhonda Vincent to release American Grandstand, a collection of covers of classic country duets. On February 12, 2018, the 46-year-old Singletary died unexpectedly at his home in Lebanon, Tennessee.
Craig Mack
If you were a ’90s kid, you probably at some point put Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear” on one of your famous mixtapes. Mack had a few hits, but that 1994 jam was a Top 10 smash, and the song for which he’ll always be best known. The story of how Mack ascended to fame is music industry legend. He ran into Sean “Diddy” Combs, then known as Puff Daddy, at a Manhattan club called Mecca in the early ’90s. Combs promised the young Long Island rapper a record deal if he could freestyle over a Mary J. Blige track. Mack did, so Combs obliged. He became one of the first stars on Combs’ Bad Boy Records, which released “Flava in Ya Ear” in 1994. A remix of the song launched Bad Boy’s next, and more famous act — Christopher Wallace, AKA Biggie Smalls, AKA The Notorious B.I.G. In recent years, Mack had quit music in favor of a pursuit of religion. He was living in South Carolina and was the subject of a still-in-the-works documentary about his new life when he died of heart failure at age 46 on March 12, 2018.
Yvonne Staples
There were a lot of family acts that broke big in the 1970s, including the Osmonds, the Jackson 5, and the Partridge Family (who weren’t really related, but still). But probably no family band was as polished and staggeringly talented in the pipes department as the
Staple Singers. The group formed way back in 1948 as a gospel act — “Pops” Staples put his kids Cleotha, Mavis, and Pervis to work. When Pervis was drafted into the Vietnam War, formerly left-out sibling Yvonne Staples stepped up. Good timing: In 1971, the group released its first album of secular gospel-funk, The Staple Swingers. Yvonne Staples sang backup (the group’s clear leader was Mavis Staples) on huge, soulful hits like “I’ll Take You There” and “Let’s Do It Again.” Staples family friend Bill Carpenter told the New York Times that Yvonne Staples “was very content in that role. She had no desire to be a front singer, even though people in the family told her she had a great voice.” Tempting and resisting sibling rivalry and resentment once more, Yvonne Staples later served as a backup singer and road manager for Mavis Staples in her solo career. Yvonne Staples, the best sister anyone could have, was 80 years old when she died on April 10.
Avicii
Since the dawn of the 2010s, superstar DJs have been the new rock stars, holding court before thousands of revelers as they press buttons, combine disparate sounds, keep the party going, and wait until just the right moment to let the beat drop. EDM, short for the umbrella title “electronic dance music,” has grown into a mainstream genre thanks to dudes like Calvin Harris, Skrillex, and Tim Bergling, a Swedish DJ and producer better known by his stage name, Avicii . He said he got the name from Buddhism, which refers to “the lowest level of hell,” but life was seemingly anything but hellish for the guy.
Avicii parlayed his success as a masterful live entertainer into short-form radio hits, such as “Levels,” “You Make Me,” “I Could Be the One,” and “Wake Me Up,” which hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013 on its way to becoming one of the most inescapable tracks of the decade. While Avicii was doing great, Tim Bergling wasn’t. At age 21, the musician was diagnosed with acute pancreatitis, which he attributed to excessive drinking. At age 25, he had his appendix and gallbladder removed. Not long after, he announced that he had to quit touring and doing live gigs, but would keep making as much music as possible in the studio. Sadly, he wouldn’t make much more — he passed away on April 20, 2018 at just 28 years old.