I see a line of cars and they're all painted black

I love the Rolling Stones song Paint It, Black, I've never heard an official line on the meaning of the song, although on reading the lyrics I believe it to be about bereavement. Either way, I like the imagery of it.

There's a certain fascination in popular culture with death, or more specifically 'untimely' death. Not a natural process, like the sleep at the end of a hard day, but more like something snatched, and stolen. Perhaps when we're young and depressed these things particular capture us -- everything from the Smiths' seemingly-endless dirges to Goth kids seem to have what could be described as an unhealthy interest. I don't suppose there is ever a healthy interest in death -- oh no, it's ok he just has a healthy interest in death. Maybe funeral directors, or coroners?

But we do hold up untimely deaths as something special, the premature demise of musicians is the subject of much speculation -- particularly why 27 was such an unfortunate year for so many, including Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison.

For myself, there are certain parts of popular culture -- certain themes of death that have always appealed to me. However it sounds, I have favourites -- favourite songs about death, favourite poems, favourite stories. I don't know if this is common or normal, but I wanted to write about it. A cautionary note, however -- please don't take this to mean I am either suicidal or self-harming. I'm not. There is no cause for concern.

I don't think growing up I ever really handled death very well. I was fortunate enough that nobody close to me died until much later, but I remember now perhaps months or years after pets dying, I would wake up almost screaming with tears, because they were gone. I think I was something like 16 when a girl in my class at school was killed in a car accident. I couldn't get my head round it, how someone could just be... gone. I think in the end I decided that it would be essentially the same thing if I pretended they had just moved away and I was never going to see them again. I guess the stories since then are just a variation on those two, with other issues mixed in.

Local Boy in the Photograph appeared on the Stereophonics first album, and was an apparently true story about a young man who died in an accident. I think it was a kind of tribute to him. Part of what I love about the song is the detail, the narrator's memory is prompted by certain items -- a smell, a taste in the air -- the train runs late, and he remembers. The sound of the song switches at this point, the tempo slows and the guitar drops out as he remembers where he was when he "heard the news for the first time". Depressed at 17, this song appealed to me -- it's so sad, and yet I wanted to be the person for whom "all the friends lay down the flowers, sit on the banks and drink for hours, talk of the way they saw him last..."

That last line brings me neatly on to my next: the poem Funeral by Carol Ann Duffy. It's a simple, stark poem -- I don't need to say its about loss. Who the person was or how they died is never mentioned. Perhaps again its an attention-seeking side of me, but I always liked the lines:
"From all over the city
mourners swarmed, a demo against
death, into the cemetary".
And not unlike in the Stereophonics song, there is the more intimate, personal level:
"we said your name, repeated
the prayers of anecdotes
bereaved and drunk

enough to think you might arrive".


Many people love James O'Barr's graphic novel The Crow. More people probably love the movie, and know nothing of the comic. I don't even want to think about the people that liked the tv show. There's many things that appeal in it, the story of revenge is not unlike the Count of Monte Cristo and is a visceral theme that applies to the animal in us all. There's also themes of love, and importantly of loss. The sadness and loss of the graphic novel are played down in the later film, but I was fascinated in the poems of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and even the melancholy song by Robyn Hitchcock. Thinking back, it might have been the song Raymond Chandler Evening that inspired me to start reading Chandler's own novels -- but it's difficult to remember for sure. Ultimately, the Crow was a story of a man who has lost the one person he cares most about and had nothing left to live for. The fact he is dead by this point is irrelevant.

There's probably more, but these are the three pieces of art that have influenced me most and influenced my own perceptions of death, Paint it Black only gets an honourable mention. See above for reassurance that there is no need for concern.