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

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

Gender

Concerning sex of the deceased, males dominated the obituary columns throughout the period under investigation. This finding is in keeping with the stereotypic image of men as reckless and aggressive, although several songs from the early 1970s to the late 1980s portrayed women as committing murder when relationship conflicts arose. Culturally, men still dominate most aspects of society, so it would not be unexpected to find them as primary players in adolescent music.

Relationships

Over time, some noteworthy changes in relationships occurred; one was the decline of boy-girl relationships. Prior to 1970, nearly one-half of the death songs referred to some form of intimate relationship involving boyfriends and girlfriends, while after 1970, just over one-fourth of the songs described such a relationship.

This phenomenon is an extension of the portrayal of young love as romantic tragedy, which for centuries has captured public attention. A partial explanation for the decline of this story line in Top 40 rock and roll may be that as women have become more liberated, they have become less absorbed with dating relationships in general and more interested in a broader scope of interpersonal issues.

Another change concerning relationships was that after 1979, no songs in which the narrator(s) died reached the chart. Thus for a long time, death has been portrayed to adolescents as something that happens to someone else. Also, death has been pictured primarily as an individual event that rarely receives community attention. In fact, death appears to affect only one survivor.

Regarding other relationships, few songs concerned husbands and wives, but this is not surprising, given that most adolescents have not been married. Overall, husband-wife death songs, and parent-child death songs after 1965, incorporated family references that did not center around rebellion and defiance. This tells adolescents that when relationships are more stable, death is less likely to be violent.

Attitudes

While there is not one predominant attitude displayed toward death in rock music, approximately half of the songs about common people portrayed death as an abrupt end to a reckless, aggressive, or evil life. Through such lyrics, adolescents are told that death is the ultimate price one pays for taking risks and living dangerously, and this mimics traditional news media content about the deaths of common people.

Concomitantly, there is almost as much interest shown in the punishment of evildoers as there is interest in their victims. The earliest of the songs, "Tom Dooley," implores the murderer to "Hang down your head and cry" because "Poor boy, you're bound to die."

In contrast, deaths of the elderly are generally neglected in Top 40 songs, and rarely is death integrated into story lines as a part of the life cycle. Where such themes are found, the stability within a lifetime also is emphasized, as in "The Three Bells" and "Eleanor Rigby."

The attitude linked to death by suicide is that it is a way to deal with pain and loss. This is true for songs about a variety of relationships, including those of romance, friendship, and family. The most recently introduced reason for suicide is that of frustration with "the system," as in the song "Something to Believe In," which deals with the suicide of a disillusioned Viet Nam veteran. In this song, the singer wonders "why so many lose and so few win."