Janelle Brown, “Death of a pop princess in the making“: the inevitable “Aaliyah’s dead, so what?” articles arrive. The public mourning for Aaliyah seems hyped and manufactured, because, after all, “was her music really that seminal, her message that fresh and genre-busting?” Well…actually, yes, but how odd it is that Ms. Brown is repulsed that people would be willing to sacrifice their autonomous decisions about what matters and what does not to the impersonal authority of the mass media, yet herself argues against Aaliyah’s mournworthiness not so much by relying on her own personal tastes but by pleading to the impersonal authority of history.