Mark Swartz – The Music Never Died: Tales from the Flipside
Sixteen irreverent and inventive fictions that riff on rock and rap mythology to envisage alternate paths for music legends who died young.
What if Biggie Smalls had survived the assassin’s bullets and reinvented hip-hop with the help of an avant-garde luminary? If Amy Winehouse had shaken off her demons and channeled her inner Barbra Streisand into a new life on a tropical island? If Jeff Buckley had been pulled alive from the Mississippi by a devilish hand and become a pioneer of Southern black metal?
With accompanying illustrations by Jeb Loy Nichols, The Music Never Died imagines what might have happened to these stars and more—including Jimi Hendrix, Gram Parsons, Janis Joplin, Lil Peep, and Jim Morrison—if their untimely deaths had been averted, or somehow hadn’t been the end of their lives.
“Mark Swartz’s phantasmagorical cultural wit joins The Music Never Died to the tradition of Lester Bangs, Steve Erickson, and Lewis Shiner, in excavating gold from fannish what-ifs, and flashing us our musical talismans back at us in a funhouse mirror.” —Jonathan Lethem
“Swartz writes, I read!—Ed Park
“A music-lover’s fever dream, The Music Never Died weaves surprising afterlives and alternate endings for some well-known artists in tart, imaginative prose. Anyone who has ached over the untimely demise of Marvin Gaye, Aaliyah, or Amy Winehouse will appreciate Mark Swartz’s exploration of their interior lives and experiences, revealing potentialities obscured by all-too-real death.”—Laura Cantrell
“Savagely precise, clever but not shallow, Swartz’s writing lacerates even as it’s deeply, disturbingly funny.”—Jeff VanderMeer (review of H20)
“To make this original treatment of a complex and indeed zany subject so consistently entertaining is proof of a new and prodigious talent.”—Harry Mathews (review of Instant Karma)
