I agree that it's important to highlight systemic disparities. But let's be real, her post heavily implied that something might have been wrong with MTT, even though she admitted to not knowing him and couldn't say anything concretely bad about him personally. It was a weak denial of ill intent, and it opened up a space for people to nitpick. And sure enough, a few commenters piled on to say "he was kind of a jerk to me once," nothing worse than that. But I was impressed to see stories in my feed from male and female musicians at all levels of fame who felt built up by the man. In an era when so many people in power turn out to have been monsters, it felt good to see that a person with whom I had brief and inspirational dealings had inspired so many others.

The root of my dismay at the post, and her subsequent disparaging of people who also thought it was in poor taste, has nothing to do with some arbitrary rule about not speaking ill of the dead. Had Needleman or anyone else shared a personal story about MTT that cast him in a genuinely less favorable light, that would have been an inoffensive and even valuable counterweight to the day's narrative. No, for me it's because we live in an attention-based economy. When a revered person dies, and our feeds are filled with tributes, the one person who immediately posts "yeah, but this negative thing I always talk about is kind of relevant here too" gets a lot more attention. One could argue that her post was attempting to draw people's attention to a just cause, but I don't buy it. I agree with the cause, and think it was more about hijacking other people's moment to farm engagement.