Death as portrayed to adolescents through top 40 rock and roll music

Adolescence, Winter, 1993 by Bruce L. Plopper, M. Ernest Ness

DISCUSSION

Popularity

Rock and roll death songs constitute a disproportionately popular subset of Top 40 music, despite the fact that they account for only a small percentage of the songs reaching the charts since 1955. Additionally, as defined by average number of death songs/year, this prominence appears to be cyclical.

To some extent, these findings may be explained both in terms of adolescent interests and the cultural environment. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, songs about adolescent romance ending in death were abundant. This was an age of social innocence in the United States, when an adolescent subculture, with a distinct identity, was emerging. Other death songs during this era included "Dead Man's Curve," a song about drag racing (another adolescent pastime), and a variety of hits by country artists singing about death in a frontier setting. Popularity of the latter type of song paralleled popularity of the television western.

Deaths of common people were portrayed in this period primarily as either the result of romantic tragedy (often through suicide and accidents) or the natural end to cowboy conflict (generally a gunfight), although a scattering of other causes also was evident. In reality, accidents were, and still are, a major cause of teenage death.

From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, death songs continued to be popular, but their content began to reflect a harsher reality. It was an era when teenagers were being drafted, when racial and economic strife was a staple of daily news reports, and when illegal drugs were more openly used and discussed. Top 40 death songs began to incorporate these concerns, including war casualties, violence in the ghetto, violence involving war protests, drug overdoses, and random violence on the streets.

From 1980-1984, only one death song reached the Top 40, and several factors may account for this. First, the Reagan presidency promoted the attitude that "everything was okay" and that the United States could feel good about itself. Perhaps death had no place in a feel-good scenario.

Additionally, as a result of the social upheaval of the 1960s, avenues other than recorded music offered ways to explore and reflect upon death. Books, call-in talk shows, and classes exploded into the culture as alternative sources of exposure. Talking openly about death became more acceptable in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so by the 1980s rock and roll was no longer one of few channels through which adolescents could express their attitudes and values.

Only two death songs appeared on the Top 40 chart from 1985-1988, but a resurgence occurred in 1989-1990, when seven death songs charted. These songs portrayed death primarily as an unhappy or violent end, with little attention to death as the natural end to a long life. Similar stresses characterized the social mileu during this period, in which the war against illegal drugs was stepped up, worldwide military intervention in Kuwait occurred, and more public awareness of other social ills such as homelessness and AIDS was evident.