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...