This dissertation theorizes and historicizes the intermedial relationships between rock music and the media by tracing the situated industrial, technological, and aesthetic interactions between rock music, television, film, and new media at key moments in the cultural history of these media. In particular, I examine the productive function of real deaths (i.e. Kurt Cobain) and figurative deaths (i.e. the death of the sixties counterculture) in fueling the interaction between rock music and the media. Recording technologies like film have often been theorized as a means of preserving life beyond death, via their “indexical traces” of the real. I put this notion of indexicality into conversation with discourses of “liveness” that come from television studies and popular music studies in order to demonstrate a common emphasis on the posthumous importance of live performance. Through four case studies that examine the reanimation of performance, I lay bare the culture industries' stake in “preserving” rock music as a profitable enterprise that must continually be repositioned in relation to different historical contexts.