While reading, “A Resonant Tomb,” from The Audible Past, I was particularly intrigued by the stories of ministers recording their own eulogies. I imagine that Sterne would make the argument that this sort of thing would have little impact today, as he explains that neither the content nor the person being eulogized was what was mesmerizing about these particular sermons, but rather it was the spectacle of the dead preaching to the living (304). At first I thought that today this wouldn’t really be much of a spectacle at all. The dead speak to us constantly, and we hear them without second thought. To be honest, before reading this article, I had never even considered the fact that it’s odd that we listen to long dead musicians without really contemplating the fact that we’ve separated their voices from a body that no longer exists. Then I realized, that to some extent, this was because they are celebrities, and we don’t have a real connection to them. There is something a little eerie about hearing the voices of my grandparents who have passed away on old home videos or on a saved voicemail, but nothing of the sort when I listen to the music of those who have died. It is almost as though once a voice becomes a song in the form of a product to be sold, it is no longer tied to the singer themself. In this way, the fears expressed by early celebrities in “A Resonant Tomb,” regarding if they should allow their voices to be recorded and heard for future generations (Sterne 297) don’t seem unfounded.
Yet, when reading about the minister’s prerecorded eulogies, I also couldn’t help but draw a connection between them and the death of David Bowie earlier this year. Bowie had been diagnosed with cancer a little less than two years before his death, and many fans consider his last album, which was released only a few days prior to his death, to have been a sort of self-recorded eulogy. He addresses death pretty specifically, opening a song from the album, “Lazarus,” with “Look up here, I’m in heaven.” An ill or dying artist creating a work contemplating his or her own demise is certainly not unique to Bowie, to the music industry, or even to this year. As my dad has always been a Leonard Cohen fan, I learned that his final album You Want It Darker, released just a few weeks before his death this year, was of a similar vein: a contemplation on life and the end of life. Interestingly enough, these albums and others like them, are some of the few I listen to in which I find I am not capable of separating the voice from the singer. In the article, “The Year of the Goodbye Album,” Lindsay Zoladz writes that Bowie’s album wasn’t just a contemplation of his life, but, “his way of art-directing his own death.” Celebrities and famous singers may lose control of their voices and works after they die, but Bowie, Cohen, and others like them have taken advantage of an opportunity many of us won’t have: they created the story of their own death and shared it, and did so in a way that will likely last far longer than that of the ministers mentioned in a, “A Resonant Tomb.”
“Lazarus,” a single from David Bowie’s last album.
Works Cited
Bowie, David. “Lazarus.” Columbia. 17 Dec. 2017.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. “The Resonant Tomb.” United States of America: Duke University Press, 2003. Pages 287- 311. Print.
Zoladz, Lindsay. “The Year of the Goodbye Album.” The Ringer. 8 Dec. 2016. theringer.com/2016-goodbye-albums-david-bowie-leonard-cohen-phife-dawg-ecd56da12634#.lztntrbrs