(NewsReady.com) – Country star Toby Keith died on February 5 after suffering a battle with stomach cancer. His loss reverberated through the music industry. Days later, another music legend passed away.
On February 7, Neill Kirby McMillan Jr., known professionally as Mojo Nixon, passed away in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The singer and songwriter skyrocketed to fame in the 1980s for his songs “Elvis Is Everywhere,” “Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child,” and “I Hate Banks.” The artist was known as a rabble-rouser who wasn’t afraid to dive into social commentary and take swipes at celebrity culture in the US.
The singer was a punk rocker who was wildly popular in the underground music scene. His music wasn’t what you would find if you turned on popular stations where the Top 10 chart-toppers were playing. Instead, it was on alternative stations and played alongside performers like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Jello Biafra. His material was described as being in your face and profane by The New York Times.
In a 1990 interview with the newspaper, Nixon said he was “a rabble-rouser who [did] humorous social commentary within a rock ‘n’ roll setting.” He once said he was the voice of “the doomed, the damned, [and] the weird.”
In addition to his singing career, Nixon was an actor and a radio host. The first movie he starred in was “Great Balls of Fire,” the film about Jerry Lee Lewis. Winona Ryder and Dennis Quaid were also in the film, and they later appeared in his music video for the Debbie Gibson song. He went on to appear in several more films, including “Super Mario Bros.”
In the 1990s, he worked as a DJ for Sincinnati’s WEBN-FM and San Diego’s KGB-FM. In recent years, he has hosted several radio shows on Sirius Satellite Radio, including the NASCAR-themed show “Mojo Nixon’s Manifold Destiny.”
Matt Eskey, the director of a 2020 documentary about Nixon, said the singer had a “cardiac event” while he was asleep on an Outlaw Country Cruise ship in Puerto Rico.
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