Mark Swartz – The Music Never Died: Tales from the Flipside
Sixteen irreverent and inventive stories 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.
Booklist praised Mark Swartz’s fiction for its “lithe satirical humor, impressive intellectual dimension, and sly provocation,” and these qualities are on full display in these at once heartfelt and borderline absurd tales.
“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
Publication date: August 20. 2024
