Death-Related Music

Death-related music is that which deals with death either as a theme in lyrical content or musical composition or is in some way connected to the experience of death or cultural rituals that accompany death. The universality of death has made it a subject matter historically dealt with broadly in both classical and popular music. This entry provides an overview of the various ways in which death has been contextualized in songs of mourning, dirges, suicide songs, and murder ballads. In addition, the cultural role music has played in the rituals that inform the human experience of death such as the use of music in funeral rituals is described.

Social Construction of Meaning in Death-Related Music

Whatever meanings are associated with death should be understood in the context of the social construction of self, shifts in the evolution of identity, and the process of rationalization that prevails in modernity. Death has moved from the realm of the natural, often occurring in the home and attended to by family, to, in a contemporary sense, death as something taboo, having been subjected to medicalization and compartmentalization. Public displays of grief are unwelcome and often thought to be indicative of some psychological malady. This shift in thinking about death, [Page 331]or rather not thinking about death, has resulted in the representation of death often in some horrific fantasy or sensational fashion, simultaneously making a spectacle of death while denying its natural certainty. In the wake of industrialization and the flourishing of technologically enhanced mass culture, natural death was relegated to the invisible sideline, whereas violent death became an important component of the fantasies offered up as entertainment, as in the case of war narratives, detective thrillers, Westerns, science fiction, horror films, and graphic comics. With respect to music, perhaps this void of representations of ordinary death in part helps to explain the postmodern curiosity in which death metal and reality rap indulge.

This shift in attitudes toward death offers us some insight into the fetishization of death in contemporary culture and ultimately enhances our sense of the cultural contradictions that inform death in the postmodern era. Death can be regarded as an “eternal sleep” or the gateway toward eternal life and, simultaneously, as something horrific to be avoided at all costs.

Functions of Death-Related Music

Death-related music may be understood most often in the context of the human need to externalize sentiments through social acts. Songs of mourning or loss are meant to serve the bereaved in the grieving process. Such songs may also figure in the social construction of one's own identity in that they mediate one's relation to the deceased. The representation given rise through song becomes symbolic of what once was but will never be again.

Just as is the case with visually recording death, songs of death may be read as both a means to keep the memory of the dead engaged in the living and a vehicle for the emotional distancing engendered in an attempt to manage the death of a loved one. In addition to offering the songwriter as well as the listener a cathartic vehicle for emotionally processing death, the recording of death-related music may give one the illusion of control over death.

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