Abstract
The essay examines the surrogate image repair/apologia offered by the family and friends of deceased musicians Mac Miller, Chris Cornell, and Naomi Judd following their untimely deaths from drug overdose or suicide. Typical image repair cases involve harmful behaviors, such as infidelity, violence, and racism, along with offenders required to speak on their own behalf in order to fend off threats to reputation. In the three cases explored in this analysis, the image threats emerged posthumously as surrogates spoke in defense of the legacies of these great musical artists. In order to fend off attacks from music fans, internet trolls, and professional media outlets, they typically used strategies of bolstering, mortification, defeasibility, shifting blame, attacking the accuser, and corrective action, but would employ them in different ways and with much different purposes than we see with self-apologia. The study extends our understanding of apologia generally by examining how it functions outside of typical image repair contexts and with different rhetors tasked with the goal of repairing image.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Stein, Kevin; Stein, Nicolas; and Barton, Matthew
(2025)
"Surrogate Apologia: Posthumous Image Repair for Mac Miller, Chris Cornell, and Naomi Judd,"
Speaker & Gavel: Vol. 61:
Iss.
1, Article 4.
Available at:
https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/speaker-gavel/vol61/iss1/4