Via Wikipedia

Earlier this week, the party people at Brightest Young Things decided to give away a pair of tickets for a December 7 concert at Strathmore by Morrissey. You might have heard that in a fever of puckishness, BYT’s editors announced that the tickets would be awarded to the reader who submitted the “best suicide note.”

Yeah, that didn’t go over too well with everyone.

On Arts Desk yesterday, Alex Baca responded to BYT’s contest with the sobering—and unexpectedly necessary—reminder that for the most part, suicide isn’t really a laughing matter, no matter how mopey a singer-songwriter’s lyrics are. Logan Donaldson, BYT’s managing editor, defended the original version of the contest as such:

As with many of our giveaways we wanted to be thematic, and working under the assumption that his most enthusiastic fans would be responding to a first-chance giveaway and would be well acquainted with his maudlin, macabre persona, we saw it as a tongue-in-cheek opportunity to stoke the creativity of the Morrissey fans within our readership.

The reality of suicide is obviously horrifying, and in no way were we promoting or suggesting otherwise. We didn’t foresee upsetting a few of our readers in our attempt at being cute with the giveaway theme.

Well, surprise, BYT! Your attempt to be cute managed to piss people off because more people than you might expect either know someone who has committed suicide, voiced legitimate suicidal feelings or had those thoughts themselves.

This morning, it appears those neon-and-snark-loving scenesters got the message. The Morrissey contest has been altered from “best suicide note” to a call for paragraphs strung together exclusively from Morrissey’s lyrics.

And guess what? Prose comprised of nothing but the downtrodden things Morrissey has sung in his 30-year career will be plenty depressing. Just read: “Fame, fame, fatal fame. It can play tricks on your brain. And you go home and you cry and you want to die.” (Those are snippets of “Frankly, Mr. Shankly” and “How Soon Is Now?”)

That’s dispiriting, but it’s not a phony suicide note that makes light of people with legitimate problems. “We changed the question as to further avoid offending readers,” Donaldson writes in an email to DCist.

Which is nice, except for one last detail, or, depending how you see it, a whole bunch of details: The submissions of many entries from the contest’s original incarnation are still posted for the world to see. (Like this one.) Donaldson did not say whether BYT intends to remove them. But perhaps some comment-scrubbing is in order?