Highlighting Tyler, the Creator, this chapter considers ways in which the erotic becomes a means by which to deny any effort to linguistically distinguish the dynamics of death and life. Read in relationship to Georges Bataille and Bacchus (the Greek god of sensuality), Tyler, the Creator positions deathlife as a mode of defilement, of destruction, that challenges the integrity and logic of the social world and the grammar and vocabulary used to narrate that social world. Distinction between life and death as the source of joy is disrupted through radical practices of pleasure. By merging joy and pain, death and life are denied the difference that would support the social world constructed in relationship to the demands of whiteness.

Focusing on horrorcore rap, this chapter notes a different arrangement vis-à-vis deathlife than that in other forms of rap or hip hop—a larger description and discussion of death consuming life. The zombie, as figured in music by Nas, Gangsta Boo, and Brotha Lynch Hung, is a particular blurring of Blackness and whiteness, and a form of existence marked and recognized only to the extent that it spreads death and entails a profound threat against life as a form of safety. This is death that cannot be bracketed, in the sense that it cannot be captured by traditional moral-ethical discourses of contact and conduct. It eludes an understanding of death as distinct and “personal” in presenting unpredictability as the inconceivable consumption of embodied life. Death by zombie involves an excess of death: death by the dead exposes the lie of a distinct life.