TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE filled the streets in Turkey for the funeral of Zeki Müren, who died on live television on September 24, 1996, after receiving a lifetime achievement award. Müren was sixty-four. His name may be not be familiar to Americans, but there were few more famous artists in Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century. For four decades, he was the country’s most popular entertainer, a powerful vocalist, songwriter, composer, poet, actor, and master of Turkish classical music. He was also screamingly, mincingly, flamboyantly, stereotypically over-the-top: a showman who lived his life openly and pushed gender boundaries in an overwhelmingly conservative country. He was, and remains, the country’s first and most cherished gay icon. A man who began his career in the same era as Liberace is now celebrated as “Turkey’s David Bowie.” Zeki Müren was one of many international pop stars whose deaths led to outpourings of grief and publicity, sometimes beyond the borders of their native lands.
When Britney Spears performed at the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards with a Burmese python draped across her shoulders, she created a scandalous, iconic pop moment that would define her image for years to come. Britney’s act, though, was nothing compared to the dangdut pop performers of Indonesia. Dangdut is a bouncy music genre with Indian and Arab influences (not unlike some of the styles Britney and her successors appropriate). The dangdut singers are young, sexy, and scantily clad; almost all the time they perform with snakes.
A snake attracts crowds and helps keep grabby male audience members at bay. A snake can be the difference between making twenty dollars and twenty-five dollars a show, and that’s a big difference, for although there are a few successful dangdut superstars, most of the performers are poor young women in backwater regions, doing their best to support their families. Some even say that the entire dangdut scene is simply exploitation of poverty-stricken women doing whatever they can to survive.
Irma Bule was a dangdut performer in the Karawang region of West Java. Twenty-six and the mother of three, she worked often with boa constrictors and, like Britney, pythons. Sometimes, she’d wrap a snake around her neck; sometimes she’d wrap a snake around one of her backing musicians. Almost all the time, she duct-taped the snake’s mouth shut.
Irma was not a national star, but all that changed on April 4, 2016, when she performed in a village in Karawang. That performance, captured on videotape, spread her name and reputation around the world. It involved a king cobra whose mouth was not duct-taped shut.
The snake had a name: Rianti. Rianti was around Irma’s neck for her opening number, as she sang and danced to organ music. For the next number, Irma knelt on one knee and let the snake crawl down her side and behind her leg.
“The accident happened in the middle of the second song when Irma stepped on the snake’s tail,” Fernando Octavion Auzura, who was in the audience, told local website Merdeka.com. “The snake then bit Irma on the thigh.”
At first, Irma didn’t seem affected by the bite. The snake was placed in a bag, and she kept on dancing. When the snake’s handler offered antivenom, she refused the medication. She joked to friends backstage that she didn’t feel any pain.
Irma must have believed the cobra’s venom glands had been removed. They had not. She sang and danced for another forty-five minutes before the venom that was pumped into her thigh had moved through her organs toward her heart. Suddenly, Irma began vomiting. She went into seizures on the stage. She collapsed and fell unconscious. She was taken to a hospital, where she was later confirmed dead.
It’s not known why Irma was performing with a king cobra. A king cobra is one of the deadliest animals in the world. It can kill an elephant—or twenty people—with a single bite.
He was born Giuseppe Mango, but friends called him “Pino Mango.” As “Mango,” he was one of Italy’s biggest music stars of the 1980s. With his fusion of pop and world music, and an incredible vocal range, he was Italy’s own Billy Joel, Peter Gabriel, and Sting, wrapped into one compact package. His fame and artistry carried over through the 1990s and into the new millennium, as he continued to expand his musical horizons and extend the boundaries of Italian pop music.
On Sunday night, December 7, 2014, the beloved star was performing a benefit concert in the town of Policoro in southern Italy. At a high point in the show, the band had left the stage, leaving Mango sitting alone onstage at the keyboard of an electric piano.
It was time for a special solo version of his biggest hit. “Oro” was from Odissea, his 1986 breakout album, so of course many in the crowd sang along with Mango:
. . . un diamante per un sì, oro . . .
Mango let the audience sing the next words: “Oro, oro . . .” He sang, “per averti così—” then stopped singing and playing. The audience carried on: “. . . distesa pura ma tu ci stai . . .” Mango gamely picked up the song. He managed to play four notes before stopping again, hands on the keyboard, head bowed. After the audience crooned the next line, “Perché accetti e ci stai?” a cappella, he stopped them, raising a hand and mumbling:
Scusa.
“Sorry.” Mango’s right hand hit the keys with a plink. He looked to his right, gestured for help, then slumped at the keyboard. A stagehand rushed onstage, and as he tried to stop Mango from falling off his seat, Mango’s arm hit the piano keys.
An ominous electric bass note tolled the end. Several other stagehands helped move the star to the floor, and a uniformed emergency worker joined them. Mango was dead of a heart attack at sixty.
This tragedy turned out to be only the first for the Mango family. At the wake on Tuesday, Mango’s older brother, the grief-stricken, seventy-five-year-old Giovanni, collapsed and also died. Two other brothers, Armando and Michele, had to be hospitalized after they found out Giovanni was dead.
Giovanni’s death was attributed to a heart attack, though some speculated his was a true case of broken heart syndrome.
“‘Broken heart syndrome’ usually affects women, and is similar to a heart attack although the symptoms aren’t as severe,” Antonio Rebuzzi, a professor of cardiology at Rome’s Catholic University told Ansa, Italy’s wire service. “It’s not unusual for a shock like a death to provoke a cardiological illness like a heart attack or malignant arrhythmia.”
Thousands gathered outside the main church in the small town of Lagonegro for Mango’s funeral on Wednesday, December 10. They applauded as his casket was brought inside. Later that afternoon, there was a funeral for his brother Giovanni.
Music fans in the Western world might know Papa Wemba from his work with Peter Gabriel. The Congolese singer and musician toured with the prog rock star on his 1993 Secret World Live tour, and recorded three albums for Gabriel’s record label, Real World Records. In Africa, meanwhile, the man born Jules Shungu Wembadio Pene Kikumba was a music superstar, flamboyant fashion icon, and envoy to the world. He was known as “the King of Rumba Rock,” a style originally called Congolese rumba, and later soukous (derived from the French secouer, “to shake”), that blended traditional African and Caribbean rhythms with rock and soul.
Papa Wemba’s greatest gift was his voice, a haunting high-pitched tenor that he inherited from his mother, a professional “wailing woman” at funerals. Singing in his native Lingala and in French, Papa Wemba toured the world with his band, Viva la Musica, for almost thirty years—until the early morning of April 24, 2016.
Papa Wemba and the band were three songs into their set at the FEMUA urban music festival in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, when he shook for the last time. His death was captured on the festival’s video feed. The band was deep into a groove; Papa Wemba rocked at a microphone center stage, in front of the drum riser. Five female dancers shook and moved in front of him. The entire group was rocking when, suddenly, Papa Wemba fell backwards onto the stage. His final vision was of those ample, shaking booties.
The band kept playing as various musicians, stagehands, and the dancers slowly realized what had happened and went to his aid. They lifted Papa Wemba to a sitting position, and took turns fanning his face with his large stylish pink hat and other objects as if the effect of a breeze would somehow stimulate his heart, which had stopped. This part of Africa had apparently not been exposed to the wonders of CPR. Papa Wemba’s eyes remained closed behind his glasses, his face slack, his body slumped. He was dead at sixty-six.
The passing of the cultural hero led to public mourning throughout the continent. Baudouin Banza Mukalay, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s culture minister, called the death a “great loss for the country and all of Africa” and praised Papa Wemba as “a role model for Congolese youth.”
Peter Gabriel posted a tribute on his website:
Music flowed out of him effortlessly and he could thrill people with one of the most beautiful and emotional voices I have ever heard. His music was full of gentle rhythms and joy, but the passion came from the power of his singing, which always carried a sadness, especially in his high voice, which I found really moving.
Gabriel also added a puzzling footnote: “His run-in with the French and Belgian immigration authorities for smuggling people into Europe was a real low-point in his career, but we only ever saw him act kindly and always assumed that his motivation had been honourable.”
Run-in with immigration authorities? Smuggling people? Say what? For those who weren’t keeping up with their Papa Wemba news, the run-in to which Gabriel referred was his 2004 trial in Paris for trafficking in visas—also known as human smuggling. It seems that Papa Wemba was running an elaborate illegal immigration scheme for people who wanted to leave the Democratic Republic of Congo and settle in Europe. He disguised them as members of his band.
When Papa Wemba traveled to Europe on tour, he’d earn a little extra pocket money by charging people $3,500 for a seat on his plane. French officials grew somewhat suspicious on December 31, 2001, when ninety Congolese people showed up at Charles de Gaulle Airport, claiming to be musicians involved in a Papa Wemba show at the Bercy Stadium in Paris. Not one of them arrived with a musical instrument. None would take a return flight to Congo.
Papa Wemba was arrested at his home near Paris; he claimed he was acting as a humanitarian, saving many young people from Congo’s savage war. He spent three and a half months in Fleury-Mérogis Prison in Paris (where he’d once performed for inmates) before he was convicted and handed a suspended sentence. After the verdict, Congolese fans outside the court danced with joy and carried their hero away on their shoulders.