AAAS 39.05 Utility of Death and Dying in African American Music
This course explores the topics of death and dying and their multiple uses across the span of African American music from the time of enslavement to the present day. Through an engagement with sound recordings, scholarly writings, journalism, lyrical analysis, film, and other sources, we will expand our understanding of how and why death is so frequently invoked in African American music. Although some reasons for these invocations - for instance, loss or mourning – may seem obvious, this course will require us to reframe our perceptions of death as simply the ending point of life. As we will learn, death and dying can serve a number of purposes, from ‘deadness’ serving as a necessary aesthetic for creation, to death being an integral part of an artist’s identity.