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. 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.