Death and the rock star

The untimely deaths of Amy Winehouse (2011) and Whitney Houston (2012), and the ?resurrection? of Tupac Shakur for a performance at the Coachella music festival in April 2012, have focused the media spotlight on the relationship between popular music, fame and death.

If the phrase ?sex, drugs and rock?n?roll? ever qualified a lifestyle, it has left many casualties in its wake, and with the ranks of dead musicians growing over time, so the types of death involved and the reactions to them have diversified.

Conversely, as many artists who fronted the rock?n?roll revolution of the 1950s and 1960s continue to age, the idea of dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse (which gave rise, for instance, to the myth of the ?27 Club?) no longer carries the same resonance that it once might have done.