The poet king is dead. Long live the poet king.
Pogues singer Shane MacGowan charged hard in his 65 years of life, so hard that his longevity became a running gag: Is Shane still alive? He didn’t burn the midnight oil; he drank it straight. It seemed impossible that he could have made it to 40. Then to 50. Then to 60.
Well, the joke’s on you. Shane MacGowan is immortal. He shuffled his mortal coil Wednesday at 65, but his voice lives on. “I wanted to make pure music that could be from any time, to make time irrelevant, to make generations and decades irrelevant,” he said. The pure music of the Pogues came to me, as it often did in those days, on a cassette. A friend of my older sister was into punk rock. “Your family is Irish, right?” he said to her. “You’ll like this.”
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