Memento mori literally means “remember you must die.” It’s an inconvenient fact, a thought to brush away. In Christianity, memento mori is a reminder to live a just life because death and judgment are ever-approaching. Carravagio’s painting of St. Jerome in his study sees the saint poring over a text while a skull watches from the corner of his desk.
Bridgers’s vision of death is spelled out in the album’s transcendent closer, “I Know The End”’—an apocalyptic fever dream that begins delicately, as Bridgers sings of finding home. It then catapults into a breakneck road trip through the end times, led by a rollicking horn section. A random pastiche of America streams by the open windows of this song, slaughterhouses and “America first rap-country’’ and the fear of God. U.F.O.s are descending from the sky. The album’s final memento mori is a prophetic billboard: “The End is Near.” Bridgers concludes, as a final sardonic aside, “I turned around, there was nothing there/ Yeah, I guess the end is here.’’
Bridgers doesn’t end up believing. This is not a conversion record. Death is and remains the end of the story for Bridgers.
The death-haunted music of Phoebe Bridgers
Bridgers’s vision of death is spelled out in the album’s transcendent closer, “I Know The End”’—an apocalyptic fever dream that begins delicately, as Bridgers sings of finding home. It then catapults into a breakneck road trip through the end times, led by a rollicking horn section. A random pastiche of America streams by the open windows of this song, slaughterhouses and “America first rap-country’’ and the fear of God. U.F.O.s are descending from the sky. The album’s final memento mori is a prophetic billboard: “The End is Near.” Bridgers concludes, as a final sardonic aside, “I turned around, there was nothing there/ Yeah, I guess the end is here.’’
Bridgers doesn’t end up believing. This is not a conversion record. Death is and remains the end of the story for Bridgers.
The death-haunted music of Phoebe Bridgers