Mortality and Music: Popular Music and the Awareness of Death

by Christopher Partridge

Overview

The evidence of death and dying has been removed from the everyday lives of most Westerners. Yet we constantly live with the awareness of our vulnerability as mortals. Drawing on a range of genres, bands and artists, Mortality and Music examines the ways in which popular music has responded to our awareness of the inevitability of death and the anxiety it can evoke. Exploring bereavement, depression, suicide, violence, gore, and fans' responses to the deaths of musicians, it argues for the social and cultural significance of popular music's treatment of mortality and the apparent absurdity of existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472527202
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/27/2015
Series:	The Ergoth Trilogy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	645 KB

About the Author

Christopher Partridge is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, UK. Recent publications include The Occult World (2014, ed.,), The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, the Sacred and the Profane (2013), Dub in Babylon (2010), and Holy Terror: Understanding Religion and Violence in Popular Culture (2010, ed.,). He is co-editor of Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music.
Christopher Partridge, Professor of Religious Studies, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, UK.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Mortality and Immortality
2. Death and the Sacred
3. The Undead and the Uncanny
4. Morbidity, Violence, and Suicide
5. Transfiguration, Devotion and Immortality

Editorial Reviews

Once again, Christopher Partridge takes us on an adventure into rarely considered regions of the pop culture world. Bringing together two of humankind's defining experiences-our awareness of death, the possibility of a world in which we are not, and our compulsion to record, celebrate, and lament our life courses musically-he has given us another example of why he remains one of our premier pop culture scholars. Highly recommended.

Delightfully spooky and illuminating all at once. Christopher Partridge is Virgil-in-headphones guiding readers into the realms of the dead. Analyzing a vast catalogue of popular songs through various theoretical lenses, and considering ways artists and audiences identify with them, he finds music functioning as memento mori, reminders of mortality; as a form of memory, a medium for the returned, the revenant; and as a cultural strategy for dealing with impermanence. Violence, gore, pilgrims hanging around the graves of dead rock stars-it's all here, thoroughly researched and beautifully written.

From the Publisher