Sometimes the sunset filters through the sliding doors at Target in a way that reminds me of church. A honey-red radiance soaks the self-checkout lanes and the mannequins in women’s apparel. We pause our carts, and for a moment, there’s a hush.
Welcome to the second installment of Midnight Radio, a dispatch of five thematic songs delivered 'round midnight on the first and fifteenth of each month. I’m not sure who coined the term “death prom,” but it is a significant sound in my life. The first and only mention of it I’ve found comes from Joe Colly’s 2011 review of Alex Zhang Hungtai’s important work as Dirty Beaches, which transforms mid-century Americana into spectral karaoke.
Death Prom should be a proper genre. But it’s more than a catchall for anything that evokes a saccharine 1950s ballad or girl bands named after jewels, their voices reverberated and ghostly. Here are my guidelines:
- Time is a factor. Listening to Roy Orbison in 1961 is not Death Prom, but hearing it bleed through the walls of a cheap motel in 2024 is.
- The urtext for Death Prom is Suicide’s "Surrender", a 1988 confection that injects a 1950s slow dance with dread.
- A doo-wop ballad from a long-dead one-hit wonder fighting its way through the radio static is the ultimate Death Prom sound.
Death Prom makes you feel a little seductive, perhaps leaning against a wall outside the party while you take a cinematic drag from a cigarette. But Death Prom also contains grief, bringing to mind Roland Barthes’s argument that every photograph is inherently morbid because it captures a moment lost to time. And Death Prom sounds like a faded photograph: a romanticized snapshot of youthful longing that exists only in hindsight. Most of all, Death Prom is about reverb: the sound of elegant decay and vapor trails.
It’s tempting to classify Death Prom as nostalgia, but I think its trajectory is forward-facing, dredging the dreams of the past into the present. It is a haunting.
And it's a fitting soundtrack for this unsettled season, in which everything seems to be happening at once yet also feels weirdly static. In a similar vein, I’m currently reading Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a sprawling, somewhat fractured novel in which the same airplane with the same passengers lands twice. This line resonated: “But when the remote control batteries are dead, we just keep pushing harder. It’s only human.”
Sadly, we're making more daylight because we broke the weather, but I hope tonight’s broadcast provides a moment of reprieve from this overheated summer. After a brief station identification featuring the Electrifying Mojo, we'll move through five essential ingredients of my Death Prom canon, including a pair of ballads from Detroit and Indonesia that seem to exist without any frame of reference or biographical information. Which is very Death Prom.
Playlist
- Dirty Beaches - Lord Knows Best
Badlands | Zoo, 2011 | More - The Larados - Now the Parting Begins
Detroit, 1957 - Annie Rae - Bang Bung Ranggaek
Indonesia, 1970 - Suicide - Surrender
NYC | Chapter 22, 1987 | More - Richard Swift - Would You?
Ground Trouble Jaw | Secretly Canadian, 2008 | More
Also contains fragments from Skeeter Davis, The Teddybears, The Paris Sisters, The Righteous Brothers, Bobby Vinton, The Moody Blues, and Elvis Presley.
The mix is below, or you can download it here. If you prefer Big Streaming, here’s a Spotify playlist, but it doesn't contain half as much reverb or whispering at the edges or the earworm ballad from Annie Rae.
Midnight Radio 002 | Download
Thank you for reading. And listening.
