{"id":841,"date":"2017-03-02T06:20:03","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T06:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/?p=841"},"modified":"2017-03-02T06:20:03","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T06:20:03","slug":"bowie-lazarus-and-eulogies-from-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig215\/2017\/03\/02\/bowie-lazarus-and-eulogies-from-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Bowie, Lazarus, and Eulogies from the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

While reading, \u201cA Resonant Tomb,\u201d from The Audible Past, <\/em>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\u2019t 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\u2019s odd that we listen to long dead musicians without really contemplating the fact that we\u2019ve 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\u2019t 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 \u201cA Resonant Tomb,\u201d regarding if they should allow their voices to be recorded and heard for future generations (Sterne 297) don\u2019t seem unfounded.<\/p>\n

Yet, when reading about the minister\u2019s prerecorded eulogies, I also couldn\u2019t\u00a0help 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, \u201cLazarus,\u201d with \u201cLook up here, I\u2019m in heaven.\u201d 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, <\/em>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, \u201cThe Year of the Goodbye Album,\u201d Lindsay Zoladz writes that Bowie\u2019s album wasn\u2019t just a contemplation of his life, but, \u201chis way of art-directing his own death.\u201d 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\u2019t 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, \u201cA Resonant Tomb.\u201d<\/p>\n