Before 2025 builds up a head of steam and all the new happenings obscure the view in the rearview mirror, we wanted to take a moment to recognize some of the people we lost in 2024. These are by no means the only significant people who passed last year. They are simply some creatives and celebrities whose lives and passing had personal significance to some of the website content crew.
Nikki Giovanni
by Sarai A.
Nikki Giovanni, who passed away on December 9th, 2024, was a renowned poet, author, activist, and icon. Above all though, she was an educator. In everything I’ve read by and about her, she was always teaching. She taught about love, relationships, identity, and social issues in her work. To this day, I’ve never come across another poet like Giovanni.
Coming across Giovanni’s work as a teen helped me realize there is hope and how I could find power in my own poetry. In short, she made me want to be a poet. Prior to reading her poetry, I struggled with feeling detached from my poems, because they were so focused on sadness, anger, trauma, etc. I was searching for a way to escape that in my writing, and I felt ashamed for doing so. Giovanni’s poetry helped me understand that I could write towards a better future without having to separate myself from past and present things that have shaped me. I could write about what brought me joy and pain, if I wanted.
During an interview with James Baldwin, Giovanni called herself pessimistic. Baldwin countered that Giovanni had too much energy for that, because “pessimists are silent. Pessimistic people have no hope for themselves or others.” Though Giovanni considered herself pessimistic, she was authentic and unapologetic. Decades later at a lecture, Giovanni said, “I don’t know that you can change the world. I do know this: You cannot let the world change you.” She was steadfast in this, refusing to let the world change her. In the poem, “Foundation-wise: Rock Solid”, Giovanni declares “I am a poem // Rocks are not born...they are made...fused from sand and sea” and “my season is not long // I am life...holding in my tenuous hand...All that humans ever will know.” She was all those things, but most importantly she was a human making sure to celebrate life and everything that made it special and ordinary.
Richard Simmons
by Cindy G.
Richard Simmons was a unique weight-loss and exercise television personality. He was especially compassionate toward his audience due to his own weight struggles as a teenager. Richard weighed over 200 pounds during his high school years. His life took quite a turn when an agent invited him to model plus-sized clothing while he was studying art in Italy. Richard noticed a note on the windshield of his car after making a promotional appearance at an Italian supermarket. The anonymous writer warned him in so many words that being overweight would eventually kill him.
Richard took this warning to heart and joined a dance and exercise class at a prestigious dance studio in Los Angeles. His classmates made insensitive remarks to him, so this negative experience inspired him to open his own dance studio. Richard’s flamboyant style classes and compassionate handling of less confident students drew celebrities and non-celebrities alike. He was a special help to his ordinary female clients who were overweight and felt self-conscious at gyms. Richard’s classes took the drudgery out of exercise and clients of all sizes felt welcomed. This friendly workout environment was the catalyst to Richard’s eventual success.
Richard Simmons was a household name by the early 1980s. He released several dance videos, such as Dance Your Pants Off and Sweatin' to the Oldies. The public thoroughly embraced this fun and upbeat approach to exercise, and the video sales made Richard a wealthy man. Richard Simmons not only helped everyday people with weight problems, but he also founded the Reach Foundation, which established fitness centers for the disabled. Richard passed away on July 13th due to heart disease. We will forever remember Richard Simmons for being devoted to helping people in every walk of life with diet and exercise.
Richard Simmons, 80s Blast-Off
Richard Simmons Sweatin' to the Oldies
Roger Corman
by davec
Today, independents (in film, music, fashion, and even brewing) are often about branding and optics that smokescreen the corporations and venture capital behind the "rebel capitalism.” There are still true independents, of course, but you find them the way people always have—by word of mouth or by accident. The indie-appearing brands that populate your social media and broadcast feeds are, by and large, counterfeit. The filmmaker Roger Corman, who died last May at 98, was an independent of the old school: shoestring budgets, outré subject matter and genres, revolving casts of like-minded and ambitious outsiders like himself. Corman made movies with titles like A Bucket of Blood, She Gods of Shark Reef, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, and he made a lot of them. He was involved in over 500 films as writer, director, or producer during a career that spanned six decades. He directed a jaw-dropping 27 movies from 1955 to 1960. To call these B Movies is to underestimate the depths of our alphabet, but they almost invariably did two things very well: entertain and make money. While many of his films became cult classics, Corman’s most lasting legacy was his capacity to find and nurture (in
a tough-love, trial-by-fire kind of way) young and talented writers and directors. In a very real way, his productions spawned what would become known as the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Directors, writers, producers, and cinematographers who got their start with Corman include Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Polly Platt, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Penelope Spheeris, and James Cameron.
I’m afraid, with our irony-obsessed, post-post-modern sensibilities, I think our culture has lost the ability to produce someone like Corman. We now have films like Sharknado and Cocaine Bear, both of which have Corman's DNA on every frame, but they were made to be viewed through a distanced, knowing sensibility. They are ready-made corporate-backed "cult" films, fun but fundamentally empty. There is a sort of innocence needed to appreciate Corman's work on its own terms and for the sheer thrill of it that I don't think is in us anymore. That is our loss.
Kanopy Playlist: Roger Corman Classics
Shannen Doherty
by Rozette P.
Who remembers when teen shows did not exist? Sure, there were family shows, like Cosby’s and Family Matters, that included teens as main characters, but the parents were also a vital part of the story line. These were shows that the whole family would watch, and all generations were represented. And then came along shows like Beverly Hills 90210. Shows that focused so much on the lives of the teens that you forget they had parents.
Beverly Hills 90210 opened a whole new world for us young folks. Suddenly, we were not a side plot in a soap opera, we were the plot. It was not a show about a whole family but a show about the teens in the family. It was a show filled with teenagers with teenage problems and one of the main characters was Brenda Walsh. She was a new girl at a new school that was full of extraordinarily rich, snobby teenagers. We wanted to love her and hate her, and we did both. For the first time, there was a show about us, Genxers. Okay, we were not called that back then, but it is who we were. They grew up alongside us. Well, they were a couple of years behind me, but I could still relate to their story lines.
This year when I heard Shannen Doherty aka Brenda Walsh passed away, it hit a bit differently. She was one of us. When I thought of her, I thought of Brenda Walsh. I thought of the teenager that was finding her way through high school and her on and off relationship with Dylan McKay. Ironically, Luke Perry, the actor that played Dylan, passed away in 2019 from a stroke. Both are gone. Both are gone due to health reasons. Health reasons that are typically related to older generations. And let us face it, GenX is aging. We are aging.
So here is to Shannon Doherty, a pioneer in teen soap opera shows. She helped usher in a generation that believed it was all about them because TV said so. A generation known for its independence and skepticism. She was an OG. Shannen Doherty April 12,1971 to July 13, 2024.
Toby Keith
by Nyla V.
As a born and raised Texan, the soundtrack of my Summers is often filled with the country music I grew up listening to. One voice that dominates that soundtrack is that of Toby Keith. Keith’s jokey, unserious takes on relationships, masculinity, and the American experience gave his songs a certain charm and appealed to the average Joe (apparently the average middle school girl, too).
I recently went down a Toby Keith rabbit hole after I heard Post Malone cover his song “Who’s Your Daddy” in a viral TikTok video. I was brought back to the times I spent with my family at South Padre Island, nursing a virgin Piña Colada while Keith’s “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” played softly in the background. These early 2000s songs really cemented in my tween brain that I didn't have to take life too seriously (a good message for a Type-A kid with serious anxiety).
Keith’s legacy is not without controversy, however. At the heart of the country’s post-9/11 nationalism kick was Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” a controversial song that glorified violent military efforts in the Middle East. He was also one of the flagbearers in the smear campaign aimed at the Chicks when they dared to criticize the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. His career remained intact, while the Chicks were shunned from music for the better part of a decade.
Although his journey through fame is not perfect, Toby Keith brought a fun, laid-back nature to country music that I really appreciated. I was saddened to hear of his death on February 5 after a battle with stomach cancer, but I was happy to “pour one out” in memory of his career and personhood in the days after. It's what he would have wanted.
Rest in peace, Toby Keith. There is not a summer night in Texas that doesn’t feel a little bit like the song “Red Solo Cup," at least to me.
Glynis Johns & Steve Albini
by davec
As a child of four or five recovering from one of many surgeries, a neighbor gave me a red plastic close-and-play record player. The record I remember most from that time is the Mary Poppins soundtrack (1964). One voice from the album has stayed with me at an almost cellular level. It is not, as one might expect, Julie Andrews’ crystalline soprano; rather, it is that of Glynis Johns on the March-time “Sister Suffragette.” Andrews’ voice is inarguably flawless. But, like much virtuosity for me, it is not compelling. It is too perfect to be interesting. Johns’ voice, by contrast, with its throaty, natural vibrato and a tone that is not so much beautiful as it is beautifully odd.I have no recollection at this point of who or what my child's mind imagined that singular voice to belong to. But I do know that it was both frenetic and friendly, cartoonish and exceptionally, uniquely, warmly human.
Jump forward fifteen or so years into a poorly lit and cluttered room in an off-campus student co-op. The turntable is by far the most expensive furnishing there unless you count the collection of hundreds of vinyl records stuffed in stacked milk crates along the walls as a single unit. The young man in torn jeans I had met a few days before and who would remain one of my closest friends to this day pulled a record from its paper sleeve, placed the record on the player and the needle on the record, and unleashed beautiful noise. I had known and loved and lived for loud, raging, ugly music for years by then, but this was interestingly different. This was Big Black's Atomizer. It was the sound of rending darkness. Only a few scratchy strands connected it to any traditional notions of music, but still somehow melodic. It was a sort of alchemy that I have yet to explain adequately to anyone, even myself. Steve Albini was the prime mover behind Big Black. For a time, Atomizer went into heavy rotation on my own turntable, but that was it. It did not change my life the way the Sex Pistols had five years before or as Hüsker Dü would a month or two later. Albini kept cropping up in conversations here, turntables or underground news blurbs there into the 1990s and 2000s. What I saw and still see in him is a dedication to the non-mercenary, DIY, the-music-is-the-only-thing-that-matters ethos of punk. He went on to form other bands, but his lasting legacy was as a recording engineer (he refused the title record producer along with any royalties from the records he made with acts like Nirvana, The Pixies, PJ Harvey, Jesus Lizard, The Breeders, Helmet, The Stooges, and Veruca Salt among many others. He, and others as well, showed me, over time, that punk--the real beating heart of punk as I understood it, could live and evolve in an adult life. I am grateful for that.
Glynis Johns and Steve Albini circulate in my bloodstream or perhaps mindstream. I carry mere fragments of fragments of the living, breathing humans they were and ceased to be this year. But that is something, I think, like an afterlife. There's solace in that.
David Lynch
by Sarah G.
David Lynch, revered film and television director, artist, musician, and weather reporter, created a heightened reality in his films, taking the normal and mundane and making it uncanny and strange. His unique style is inimitable but anyone who tries will have their work called Lynchian. Fans of Lynch endlessly search for the true meaning of his work, but he has always strongly refused to give explanations, allowing it to be open to interpretation. Lynch is probably most well-known for the television show Twin Peaks, but I’m sure I’m not the only person who squirmed through the discomfort of Eraserhead before graduating to the deep melancholy of The Elephant Man, the twisting 
and unwieldy mystery and drama of Mulholland Drive, or the depravity of Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. The main thread in his work is an evil lying just underneath the surface, usually represented by a dark and persistent electrical hum. But unlike many film directors who dwell only in the darkness, Lynch understood how to balance the dark with lighthearted comedy. Even though his films were focused on difficult subjects, everyone said he was a wonderful person to work with. Frequent collaborators Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern, who starred in some of his first films, went on to become beloved movie stars.
I mourn the loss of this truly original American artist who was unafraid to portray the uglier side of life and captured our darkest dreams on film.
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