The news of Peabo Bryson’s death has sent a ripple of sorrow through the entertainment world, with Celine Dion declaring herself ‘heartbroken’. But let us not mistake sentiment for significance. Bryson’s passing is more than a celebrity obituary; it is a symbol of a cultural shift that we have been too timid to acknowledge. We are witnessing the slow, dignified death of the romantic ballad, that overwrought, orchestral expression of love that defined the late 20th century.
Consider the context. Bryson, alongside Dion, gave us ‘Beauty and the Beast’, a song that was itself a relic of a bygone Disney renaissance. That era, with its lush arrangements and earnest vocals, now feels as distant as the Victorian parlour songs my grandmother used to hum. Today’s music is algorithmic, autotuned, and atomised. We have traded the soaring duet for the solitary, self-referential track. The communal experience of the ballad, two voices entwined in a shared narrative, has been replaced by the curated isolation of the playlist.
Bryson’s death, then, is not just a personal loss for Dion and his fans. It is a marker of intellectual decadence. We no longer have the patience for a four-minute crescendo. We demand immediacy, the instant gratification of a hook. The ballad required a suspension of disbelief, a willingness to be swept away. We are now too cynical for that. We prefer irony, detachment, the knowing wink. Bryson’s sincerity, his refusal to smirk at his own craft, now seems almost quaint.
This mirrors a broader societal trend. We are witnessing the decline of the public intellectual, the slow death of the reasoned debate. In their place, we have the hot take, the tweet, the algorithmically curated opinion. Just as the ballad has been supplanted by the click-bait anthem, so too has nuanced discourse given way to polarising soundbites. We are all impoverished by this.
Some will say I am overthinking a pop singer’s death. They will accuse me of being a contrarian, of using tragedy to push a pet theory. But that is precisely the point. We have become afraid to connect the dots, to see the patterns in the carpet. Bryson’s death is a minor note in a larger symphony of decline. The question is: are we brave enough to hear the music?
Dion’s heartbreak is genuine, I do not doubt. But let us also feel a different kind of heartbreak: the loss of a cultural moment that will not return. We are not just mourning a man; we are mourning an entire way of feeling. And that is the truest tragedy of all.
