It was the same old, tired, rock & roll cliche: Johnny LeSpittle was just another kid who liked to play music, you know? He’d just sit at home, jammin’ on his Mixman, making ringtones, scratching. And then, almost overnight, he hit the big time. All of a sudden, one of his MashUps was all over SoulSeek, and everybody knew his screen name. He was like—the Numa Numa kid of our generation.

All that attention—the fans, the groupies, the bloggers—it changed him, man. He fell in with a whole different set of people, hanging out in rough forums, starting flame wars just for fun. He started using weird, goth avatars.

Eventually, he just hit bottom. We could all see it coming. You live that fast, you fly that close to the sun, you’re gonna burn out. He’d gotten involved with a real shady group of MySpace friends who were just users, man, just trying to get a piece of him, you know? Hotlinking his audio files and stuff.

And then he got really involved in an intensely unhealthy IM relationship with this high school girl. It got really obsessive. He’d chat with her for hours. He neglected his music. Finally, he forgot to renew his domain name registration and his whole empire collapsed around him. Last I heard he was addicted to some low-grade flash game.

It’s sad, man. But we still have the music. Who can forget his anthemic “Dick Cheney” ringtone? I can still see him poised over the crossfader on his first Mixman, panning back and forth with that inimitable twitch of his, making pitch adjustments in real time.

That’s how I prefer to remember Johnny. Before he crashed, you know? In his prime, rockin’ out hard—two Saturdays ago.

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