Ones We Lost Too Soon

So, the last few days as school is closing up and finals are beginning, I've been relaxing and of course, watching movies...no shock there. In fact, friends always mention how I'm either watching movies, sleeping, or in dance class, my life is very small. But anyways, from all this movie watching, I've rediscovered two of my favorite movies Dirty Dancing and Selena. The first you've probably heard of and the second, probably not. What connects these two movies are that both deal with stars that we lost too soon.

Selena: for those that don't know who that is, she was an Latino singer that came out of Corpus Christi, Texas. Music was a family business; Selena's father Abraham began the band Selena y Los Dinos that started with Selena as the lead singer and her two siblings playing drums and bass. As Selena and her siblings got older and the band picked up momentum, they slowly gained more members and also gained popularity as Latino artists. Selena was only 16 years old in 1987 when she won Best Female Vocalist at the Tejano Music Awards and the next seven years, she would dominate these awards. She also went on to win Best Mexican-American album at the Grammy Awards. Unfortunately, Selena was murdered in 1995 at the age of 23 by the ex-President of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar.

Selena made waves in the Latino music community and had such a great effect on so many people. The reason most people don't know about her is because she focused mainly on Latino music during her life and died before her English language album was due to come out in stores. It was during 1995 that Selena was going to debut as an English language singer. Seeing how much of an impact she had on the Latino music community, one can only imagine how well she could have done with her English language songs and albums for the future. She was certainly lost too soon from the world at the age of 23. But it is certainly magnificent how much of a success Selena was just during these first years and how much she came to mean to so many people.

For more of a view of her life, I definitely encourage watching the movie Selena, a biopic made in 1997 starring Jennifer Lopez as Selena. However, all the singing done in the movie are recordings of Selena singing so you get to hear her voice. Also, here is a music video by Selena: Amor Prohibido Music Video.

Another artist that we lost too soon was of course Patrick Swayze who starred in Dirty Dancing. Although he led a considerably longer life than Selena, Swayze died less than two years ago in 2009 at the age of 57. After watching Dirty Dancing, I realized just how much I love that movie and how great Swayze is in it. As I went to look for other movies he's been in that I would enjoy, I found very few. As such, it's sad to know that he didn't get a longer time to continue working as an artist.

Of course, there are many other artists that we've lost in recent years including Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy among others. If you have any favorite actors, singers, dancers, etc that you feel we lost too soon, please share.