In Deathlife, Anthony B. Pinn analyzes hip hop to explore how Blackness serves as a framework for defining and guiding the relationship between life and death in the United States. Pinn argues that white supremacy and white privilege operate based on the right to distinguish death from life. This distinction is produced and maintained through the construction of Blackness as deathlife. Drawing on Afropessimism and Black moralism, Pinn theorizes deathlife as a technology of whiteness that projects whites’ anxieties about the end of their lives onto the Black other. Examining the music of Jay-Z; Kendrick Lamar; Tyler, the Creator; and others, Pinn shows how hip hop configures the interconnection and dependence between death and life in such a way that death and life become indistinguishable. In so doing, Pinn demonstrates that hip hop presents an alternative to deathlife that challenges the white supremacist definitions of Blackness and anti-Blackness more generally.

"“Anthony B. Pinn shows how Black critical theory’s focus on the antagonism between the human and Blackness can be heard in hip hop and popular culture. His concept of deathlife—the merging together of death and life—underscores how the sphere of the (white) human relies on the fantasy of cordoning off life from death. Whiteness, Pinn argues, needs Black deathlife in order to understand life and death.”" - Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress