Drawing on the myth of Orpheus and the image of the contemporary hustler, chapter 1 explores deathlife through attention to Jay-Z as an “Orphic hustler” who understands death as already and always bound to life—and for whom ethics entail an effort to maintain the tension between the two. Jay-Z's work suggests a type of irrelevance through a signifying of traditional moral and ethical standards by means of which the hypocrisy of the social world is exposed. And it is in relationship to this irrelevance that Jay-Z's framing of the hustle projects him as above and outside the grasp of forces of demise, or what one might call the structuring and performance of deathlife.

This chapter explores the delicate balance between life as death and death as life through Kendrick Lamar's album DAMN. The imagery is rich: lack of lucidity or awareness is absence of something vital, and this results in demise. And there is no safeguard. The chapter argues that all the action (that is, life) taking place within the various lyrical narratives offered on the album is consumed by the specter of death. The chapter positions Lamar as an antihero whose challenge to the illusion of the distinction of life versus death is positioned against the heroic view expressed in Eminem's “Stan.” The latter is an effort to pretend that heroism is a safeguard for life, rendering it distinctive.