"A tangle of stuff seems to lie behind these mawkish tributes: from a charitable perspective, a simple devotion to the music, though that element is often overshadowed by slightly warped factors - chiefly, a darkly romantic fixation with dying young. If the central delusion of fandom is the idea that one's idol is close to a different order of being, the tributes left at graves are that idea in excelsis. No matter that many of the stones denote people who exhibited the usual rock-star pathologies: violence, alcoholism, arrogance, misanthropy. In death, all becomes perfection, plectrums and flowers."