Good mournings

Life-and-death tunes

by Josh Kun

Lydia Lunch

Ever since he asked me to, I've imagined my father's grave as a listening station. He asked me to after his father died five years ago, after a ceremony of observant silence, of dark, brittle suits flinging warm California dirt on hard sunken pine. "When you visit my grave," he said in the car on the way home, "bring a Walkman. I want you to keep playing me new music."

I can hardly count the number of times I've tried to imagine what it will be like, sitting on moist grass, holding the earpiece of a headphone up against the cold, water-sprinkled slate of his headstone, the music leaving the machine and traveling through the earth and, as it does with all of us, vibrating through his bones.

Don't mistake this for morbidity. I know that when the time comes, decades from now, playing him music will do more than keep him alive in my memory. It will bring him back to life each time I press "play." I'd like to think my father knew this when he made the suggestion, that he knew listening to music is always speaking to the dead, and that the dead always speak back.

The history of recorded sound knows this as its origin myth; only a year after he made tin foil talk, Edison wanted the phonograph (Thomas Mann's "sarcophagus of music") to serve as a "Family Record," recording among other things, the last words of the dying. In a recent article in the Wire, Erik Davis paints a more supernatural picture: Edison, like Alexander Graham Bell's plans for otherworld telephonic communication, once tried to put together a device that would "capture the voices of the dead." So could it be? All recorded music bears the trace of death? All acts of listening are acts of both mourning and reanimation?

A new compilation from Germany's Trikont label, Totenlieder: Songs of Death, is a gloomy meditation on music's pan-cultural death function. It proposes music as a universal method of processing loss and absence, whether Kid Smith and the Virginia Dandies begging "Whisper Softly, Mother's Dying" or the Confraternité delle Voci Castelsardo lifting souls to the sky in their "Miserere Funebre." And sometimes the absence is our own. Lydia Lunch volunteers herself for the "black coach of sorrow" on the Billie Holiday-associated "Gloomy Sunday," moaning, "My heart and I have decided to end it all." Lydia Mendoza's chilling rendition of "La Boda Negra" tells the gravedigger's tale of a man who digs up the bones of his beloved to marry her and then seals his fate with hers under the covers of their honeymoon bed.

The collection's centerpiece is Holiday's "Strange Fruit," a song that with its vivid, unshakable images of "black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees" reminds us that musical mourning can also be musical protest. The tear in Holiday's voice is as much from sadness as from anger; "Strange Fruit" is not really a "song of death," it is a song of lynching, and therefore of murder and racial terror.

The Geto Boys' "I Just Wanna Die" is Totenlieder's only nod to hip-hop, a culture that has been forced to make death wishes and public "Dead Homiez" rituals of mourning part of its very purpose. But a post-mortem vigil like 2Pac's "Changes" or DMX covering himself in his own blood, playing Death, and then getting ready to meet God throughout Flesh of My Flesh Blood of My Blood (Def Jam) should not be swallowed up into the hip-hop-as-black-nihilism narrative. Hip-hop is constantly giving voice to the dead and the dying, using its rhymes and, above all, its ghostly samples to commemorate the very things it needs so desperately to bring back to life.

On the radar

* Rappers AG, Defari, and Xzibit helping to make last year's best 12-inch single (Dilated People's "Work the Angles") this year's best (so far) on "Rework the Angles" (ABB). Runner-up: the Unspoken Heard's "Better" (Seven Heads).

* DJ Rap slithering into a tubetop, grabbing the mike, and going for I'm-every-junglist-woman status with her "Bad Girl" and "Everyday Girl" singles (Higher Ground).

* Sophia Loren making a lowbrow comeback with a new cookbook and the single "Zoo Be Zoo Be Zoo (Funky Monkey Mix)" (Warner Bros.).

* Imperial Teen's "Yoo Hoo" being the only reason to see Jawbreaker (unless Marilyn Manson and Rose McGowan feigning doggy-style does it for you) and one of many to listen to IT's What Is Not To Love (Slash) on repeat.