Hobart :: Songs in Case of Sudden Death

On a Wednesday I wonder if Bob Dylan will accompany my mangled form into the afterlife; the following Friday I imagine John Lennon. A week later, surrounded by shattered glass, a rusted guardrail impaling the awful tableau, I’m sure I’ll hear Nina Simone as I draw my final, ragged breath. There are now over one hundred songs on my “untimely death/car crash” playlist, all carefully selected in case I should perish in a macabre tangle of metal and gasoline on southbound M-39.

M-39 is a grey chute of concrete bisecting metro Detroit, a regular part of my commute. It chainsaws through urban decay and development alike, miles of new and crumbling brick, the shoulder a graveyard of discarded Big Gulps and broken 40s and containers for other beverages that never really quench your thirst. Five billboards featuring shark-eyed personal injury attorneys loom across the freeway, and I’m often fearful that their outsized, two-dimensional faces will be the last I see in this life. I can’t do much about what I see here, but the audio element is definitely within my grasp.

“This is beyond morbid,” my husband, G, tells me when I inform him of my playlist. I shrug and add a few Miles Davis tracks, deciding some instrumentals might be nice. Lyrics sometimes devolve into underwhelming choruses: strings of baby or hey or oooh, less than ideal listening for the last moments of life.

“God forbid a stupid remark on some podcast be the last thing I hear before I leave this world!” I say.

This is the crux of it, really. It’s not just the thought of dying in a wreck in suburban grayscale that depresses me, it’s the notion that the soundtrack to my death would be so inane: a movie plug or fake laughter or an ad line punctuating my demise. Imagine a death scene in a movie, but the music isn’t Hans Zimmer or John Williams—it’s the jingle for Auto Zone. 

Read More Hobart :: Songs in Case of Sudden Death by Casey Jo Graham Welmers