Hot, Sexy and: (a) Dead (b) Undead (c) Other...

FAMOUS ROLLING STONE COVER HEADLINE: “He’s Hot, He's Sexy and He’s Dead”         Rolling Stone magazine’s famed headline about Jim Morrison, on the cover of the September 17, 1981 issue        These memorable words were used for a Rolling Stone story about the legendary singer and lyricist for The Doors, published a few months after the 10th anniversary of Morrison’s death.          The article, written by Rosemary Breslin, noted that Doors albums were selling better than ever. A spokesperson for the band’s label Elektra/Asylum Records, told her: “The group is bigger now than when Morrison was alive. We’ve sold more Doors records this year than in any year since they were first released.”        The catchy Rolling Stone headline soon became reused, repurposed and parodied — and still is today — in variations that use a three-adjective formula that may or may not use the words hot, sexy or dead, even though most are consciously (or unconsciously) based on the 1981 Rolling Stone headline.

INFAMOUS ROLLING STONE COVER VARIATION: “He’s hot. He’s sexy. He’s an accused terrorist.”        Mary Elizabeth Williams        Staff writer for Salon.com        In a July 17, 2013 Salon.com post about the outrage over the cover of the August 1, 2013 issue of Rolling Stone, which featured a photo of “Boston Marathon Bomber” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.           Many observers harshly criticized Rolling Stone for seeming to glamorize the “accused” (but obviously guilty) terrorist, by not only featuring him on the cover but also picking a photograph in which he looks sexy and attractive. “With tousled hair and bedroom eyes,” Williams wrote, “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looks more like this month’s emo chart burner than a bombing suspect.” Nonetheless, Williams defended Rolling Stone. She noted that the magazine had always covered news and politics as well as music, and Tsarnaev was newsworthy. “With news comes notoriety, and a photograph is not automatically glamorization,” she concluded. “But the fury over the Tsarnaev image shows that it’s not always so clear, and the unease that the fuzzy line between infamy and fame brings.”

THE UNDEAD PINUP BOY VARIATION: “The genius of the Twilight saga is the way it celebrates the passion of the all-American fang hag, with Robert Pattinson as the perfect plasma-slurping pinup boy:  He’s hot, he’s sexy, and he’s undead.”        Rolling Stone review of the soundtrack album from the 2009 movie New Moon, the second film based on the Twilight saga book series.

THE UNDEAD HOOKER VARIATION: “She’s hot. She’s sexy. And she’s sutured to please.”       Promotional tagline for the cult classic horror flick Frankenhooker (1990)

THE UNDEAD JIM MORRISON VERSION: “Morrison: Still Hot, still sexy, still dead.”          Associated Press headline for a review of the 1991 movie The Doors, starring Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison

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