Fame, Fantasy, and Disappointment

Should I separate the art from this artist too?

Mar 11, 2026

I’m sick in bed listening to my favourites on shuffle. I haven’t quite listened to my favourites for a really long time. Years typa long time. And I’m hearing so much ball.

Then the song My House Is Not A Home by d4vd (real name David Anthony Burke) plays. Then Backstreet Girl. Then Bleed Out. I remember how these were my comfort songs throughout high school. How d4vd was my comfort artist. I think I had him on my wrapped top 5 for 4 years straight ever since he started releasing music (last year included.) But I stopped listening to him. Why did I stop listening to him?

This is a story of Fame, Fantasy and Disappointment.

We mourn the version we invented. That is the strange thing about “celebrity.” We build people in our minds long before we truly know them. A voice becomes a companion and a song becomes a refuge. An artist becomes something larger than themselves, something shaped by our own loneliness, our own hope and need to be understood. This guy was really my niche artist. Him and Joji (i hope Joji wangu ako clean woi)

Celebrity is a shared delusion.

We often treat lyrics like they were written just for us. Building emotional homes inside songs. Then we believe that the person who made them must somehow understand us in a way no one else does. I don’t really know about others, but for me it really is that deep.

But we loved a lie. Because this is what fandom quietly asks of us. It asks us to believe. And then the story changes.

Before any conversations like this one, it was just music.

I remember listening with headphones in the dark, letting the same artist, the same tracks, loop over and over because they felt like the only thing that understood me. I memorised the lyrics without even trying. They lived in me.

That is the version of him I knew. My niche artist. Not the celebrity, not the person people are talking about now. Just the voice that helped me through shit.

For people discovering him now, that’s not the version they see. They meet him through a really different lens. They see the headlines and the controversy first. Mostly people who didn’t know him or his music before. And because of that, people will never understand what it felt like before all this. They will never hear the music the same way I did.

Celeste Abigail Rivas Hernandez

A 15-year old girl,

dead.

It’s so easy in celebrity stories to let the famous person become the centre of everything. Their career, reputation, downfall. Their narrative. The victim becomes a detail that fades behind the gravity of fame.

That should not happen here. Celeste was a person. She had a life. She had people who loved her. A world she should still be part of. Whatever the truth of the situation eventually becomes, that loss stands on its own and it matters more than the preservation of any celebrity image.

Her story deserves space. Her name deserves to be remembered without being overshadowed by someone else’s fame.

Old adage is we should separate the art from the artist. It sounds simple when said out loud. But in reality it rarely is.

(Kinda have been listening to his new album because I never did and it’s actually good.)

Music isn’t just sound, it’s memory. When someone’s music helped carry you through so much, you can’t suddenly pretend that the person behind it never existed. At the same time you can’t ignore the reality surrounding them either.

Both things, the music that helped you live and the reality, sit at the same place in your mind, fighting. And I don’t know. We subconsciously trust these people so much that some things become unimaginable.

(This guy to me is what i’d like to assume a person like Rihanna is to most, pardon me for lack of a better example, so just imagine that a body has been found in her car and it’s an underage boy that she had been grooming. Then people start the usual “it’s always been evident” “you can see it in his eyes” “his music has always had clues.”)

I’m not mourning just an artist. I mourn the safe emotional space those songs created for me. I also mourn the fact that Celeste does not get another chance at life.

Fame allows us to build fantasies about people we have never met. We give them pieces of ourselves and assume the image we created must be real.

Artists are still human. Imperfect, complicated. Capable of beauty and capable of darkness. Sometimes the distance between the person we imagined and the person who exists in reality is too wide to ignore.

No matter how much celebrity might be a shared delusion, the emotions we attach to it are painfully real.

Disclaimer: This piece reflects personal feelings about the situation. At the time of writing, David Anthony Burke has not been convicted of a crime and investigation remains ongoing, though has been named as a prime suspect in the case involving Celeste. Regardless of the legal outcome, the fact that he was communicating with and grooming a 15-year old girl is deeply troubling and cannot be ignored.