Death of a guitar hero: The art of metal reputation maintenance

Abstract

Combining insights from identity, gender and ethnicity studies while incorporating notions of the sacred, the death of guitar hero, Randy Rhoads, in a plane crash in 1982 is addressed to establish how maintenance of Rhoads’s reputation as a saintly, innocent character who died because of a mysterious accident has been constructed and maintained for over forty years. Situating his death in a comparative analysis with premature deaths of other guitarists, Tommy Bolin and Allen Collins, in addition to artists from other musical genres, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Donna Summer, frames of similarities and differences emerge to reveal how identity and reputation is achieved and maintained after death within heavy metal but also in other genres. Three specific tropes including accident equals innocence, transgression equals recklessness and transgression equals criminality are defined and applied throughout. These reveal that posthumous identity, be it positive or negative, is actively constructed and is imbued at times with gendered and racial elements. Via the application of criticality, the findings show how the posthumous consecration of Rhoads and other decedents is accomplished via selective emphasis on particular claims and the silencing of others, with locus of responsibility for a tragic death, either internal or external, being crucial.