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This personal, non-fiction essay explores the punk subculture and themes of death as a teenager growing up in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, New York, in the 1990s. Within this text, punk and indie music releases, exposure to live performances in unconventional spaces, independent record stores as an alternative education, and participatory fanzine culture, serve as a pivotal catalyst for rejuvenation and release – for creativity and self-expression while grieving the loss of one’s mother from cancer. The punk subculture and its related ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) media communities which eventually led to a professorship prove to be both inspirational and a transformative method of healing and being.

Freddie Mercury rose to fame as the lead singer of the UK pop group Queen. The group started working on tracks for their fourteenth studio album, Innuendo, in early 1989, and the album was finally released in February 1991. Progress on recording was slow as Mercury, who had been diagnosed with AIDS, was unable to work for more than a few days at a time. Innuendo became the final Queen album to be released during Mercury’s lifetime, and ‘The Show Must Go On’ is its final track. Its placing is arguably significant, given that both Mercury and the remaining band members must have assumed that this would be the last album that they would record together. In this chapter, I present an analysis of the song’s music and lyrics, along with the music video that accompanied the single release, with reference to Mercury’s illness and his wish to contribute vocals for as long as he possibly could, knowing the seriousness of his condition meant that this would be one of his last recordings.

Metal saved my life. It is not the first time and it probably will not be the last. The death of my mother when I was twenty-one meant that I was alone, and if it had not been for metal, my grieving process may have been the end of my story. The death, of course, is one thing, but mourning is something that surfaces many years after the event. If I had not bought my first guitar the year she died, the last nineteen years of my life would follow a very different narrative.

I firmly believe that metal and metal performance prevented my suicide and any plans for revenge. It matched my pain, sonically, texturally, musically and aesthetically. It initiated a cathartic process that I have returned to since, because it offers me emotional and psychological balance that other music forms do not. This may be a purely subjective engagement, but that is precisely the point.

Remembering this time in my life is not easy, and can often come in hesitations, blanks and painful memories. By using interpretive performance autoethnography, a methodology that Laurel Richardson calls CAP or creative analytic practice (Richardson, 2000, p. 929) means:

[it] allows the researcher to take up a person’s life in its immediate particularity and to ground the life in its historical moment. We move back and forth in time, using a version of Sartre’s progressive-regressive method. Interpretation works forward to the conclusion of a set of acts taken up by the subject while working back in time, interrogating the historical, cultural, and biographical conditions that moved the person to experience the events being studied

Through this methodological application, this paper seeks to analyse how metal and metal performance helped me write my trauma into a performing life that ultimately liberated me from my grief.

This personal essay explores the palpable connections between music, memory, dreams and language through the lenses of international auto travel, a commingling of the author’s adult and adolescent recollections and a rock’n’roll band called the Tragically Hip. The vitality of Canadian music, radio, growing up on the US-Canada border, new parenthood and familial bonds are through-line themes. Death takes centre stage, of course, via rumination on the Tragically Hip’s final performance of its final song in 2016 – during which most, if not all, listeners and viewers knew that the group’s singer, Gord Downie, would shortly thereafter succumb to a terminal illness.

In this chapter, I discuss the artistic representation of the musical illustration of funeral rites and ceremonies in contemporary Poland. The death of a person in many cultures is perceived as an important point in the life of a given community, especially a family; hence, people tend to express feelings stemming from these circumstances through art. Songs sung at funerals and during the mourning period have been used for centuries as a way for the living to express their grief for the person who has died. From an anthropological point of view, the main function of music accompanying funeral rites is to help family and friends of the deceased recover from their loss.

To illustrate my argument, I analyse the recording of folk songs by Adam Strug and Kwadrofonik: ‘Requiem Ludowe’ (‘The Folk Requiem’), released on CD in 2013. The musical motifs and lyrical themes are based on original folk tunes of Eastern Poland (Podlasie and Lubelszczyzna regions) that are still used in the villages during the bereavement period. The songs on the CD, which are: ‘Czemu tak rychło, Panie’ (‘Why is it So Soon, my Lord’); ‘Żegnam cię mój świecie wesoły’ (‘Goodbye my Merry World’); ‘Żegnam was mitry i korony’ (‘Goodbye to you Mithra and Crowns’); ‘Żegnam was wszystkie elementa’ (‘Goodbye to you all the Elements’); ‘Powiem prawdę świecie tobie’ (‘I Shall Tell you the Truth, my World’); ‘Piekło’ (‘The Hell’); ‘Czyściec’ (‘The Purgatory’); ‘Niebo’ (‘The Heaven’); and ‘Wieczność’ (‘The Eternity’) are rooted in Christian funeral traditions and they are supplemented by elements of Slavic folklore.

The lyrics of the mourning songs published on the recording display a specific attitude to the mythology of death and bereavement present in the culture of Polish peasants. The main themes of these folk songs, namely, the praise of the deceased, the grief of the remaining family, the preparation of the dead one for eternal life or the attempts to cross the threshold of life and death, are presented by the artists as the soul’s journey from the Earth to the Underworld, and through Purgatory to Eternal life as a final stage of a person’s destination. They show how the rural people imagine death itself and express their feelings of loss and grief in art to overcome the fear of the unknown.