On Black Dresses' debut EP, a remix EP of M.I.A.'s Paper Planes, Laura Les has a song under the moniker osno1 called "Paper Planes(osno1 "i Want The Laugh Cry Emoji On My Tombstone" remix)". You might recognise the sentiment, it is echoed in a song she made with her bandmate Dylan Brady as 100gecs: "And I'm pickin' up the pace / I'm so happy I could die / put emojis on my grave / I'm the dumbest girl alive". Death permeates both songs, her rendition of paper planes puts emphasis on the phrase "lethal poisin for the system", and in Dumbest Girl Alive, she says "and I feels so dangerous", and that "I did science on my face". In both cases the death isn't literal, both M.I.A. and Laura Les are exxagerating harmful stereotypes of their demographics(immigrants and trans women respectively) to make a point about how they are perceived.
Death is a strange topic for pop music to cover, and the two examples of pop songs with death in them are counter cultural, they are about marginalised identities but those artists have carved a niche in what we call "pop music" that is far more influential than we might realise at first glance. Probably the most famous example of death in a piece of "pop" media is actually not from a song at all, but from barbie, where the inciting incident of the film is that barbie gets "thoughts of death", breaking the spell of the corporate "pop" ideology/society/matrix/Debordian-spectacle/you-know-what-I'm-talking-about that she was stuck in her entire life. We might therefore understand pop as antithetical to death, through fame you live forever and whatnot. Fitting that the most prominant Los Angeles cemetery is called "Hollywood Forever", you don't go to LA to die, you go there to be immortalised.
The most famous death-obsessed popstar at the moment is Charli XCX, who just spent a year mourning the death of brat, a process that turned into the existential and more general reflection on art, capitalism, and death; music, fashion, film. An album which ends on about a minute and a half of David Cronenberg chanting "they are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever" is the sort of perfect antithesis to pop that this album pausits itself to be. Though I find MFF being an album that wants to tell you at every turn that "this isnt a pop album" exhausting, from rock music("the dancefloor is dead / now we're making rock music") to card decline's critique of consumerism through monotone delivery. I do find its worth noting because in ending the "anti-pop" album on a definite statement on death. Also interesting to note: as part of the press tour for this album, Charli did an interveiw in Hollywood Forever cemetery.
The first place I heard of Hollywood Forever was in the underscores song named after it, and of course it fucking was. Underscores forms an interesting counterpoint to charli in 2026, after a critically acclaimed Not A Pop Album, she makes a very pop album with production inspired by the likes of Imogen Heap(I'm told, I have not listened to Heap's music), Britney Spears, etc. Underscores here reinforces the meaning of the cemetery's name, the lyric "bury me in Hollywood forever", which I first interpreted(before I knew about the cemetery) as something akin to "bury me in Hollywood, such that I can live forever", could also form a double entendre. April has said about the album that it was inspired by spaces such as Airports, shopping centres, and hotels. This is space devoid of representational space, nobody lives here, people just pass through. Of course wee see this subverted all the time, think of the noir trope of living in a motel, but in principle, nobody is supposed to live here. But the interesting thing about nobody living in the spaces that inspired U, is that if we invert it, nobody dies here either.
Now we come to a far more common depiction of death in pop, an defiance of it through eternity. This usually materialises in the love song, George Riley sings for example "I think I wanna make you mine / forever". A very nice romantic notion of love lasting forever is featured on an album that has a similar attitude towards fame to that of underscores on you, songs like more and private life speak on the experience of life in the public eye, private life especially feeling reminiscent of the boundry setting on underscores' "Do it".
The lyric "bury me in hollywood forever" also reads as an instruction, the recipient of which is probably a lover, given most of the other songs on U are love songs in some form or another. The connection between death and romance is one as old as Romeo and Juliet, and it is by far the most common depiction of death in pop. Its a connection that Magdalena Bay makes on "Death and Romance", the titlular lyric of this song; "nothing is fair in death and romance", is another rejection of the pop narratives about death, but also about love.
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On the same album that 100gecs asks for emojis to be put on their grave, the state that "you'll never make it in hollywood, baby". Acceptance and acknowledgement of death is once again a rejection of pop.