All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Oct. 24, 2023 - Skeptoid
17:33
Skeptoid #907: The Science of the 27 Club

Do lots of famous pop musicians really die at the age of 27, or is there something in science that just makes us think so? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Mystery of the 27 Club 00:01:21
The 27 Club is that inauspicious group of famous pop musicians who all died at the age of 27, as if there's some mystical significance behind that particular age.
Well, this raises two questions.
The boring one, which is whether there's anything special about 27, and the more interesting one, which is what motivated pop culture to go looking for such a thing and to give the 27 Club a name and to pay attention to it.
Because that's where the real science here is.
The 27 Club is coming up right now on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast for Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Why Rock Stars Die Young 00:04:53
The science of the 27 Club.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Somewhere in the world is a very old, very beat-up white electric guitar, a model called a Supro-Ozark.
It's untraceable, having undoubtedly gone through a shady pawn shop sale or two, so nobody knows its original history.
But if it could be proven, it would turn out to be probably the most valuable guitar in the world.
It is the first electric guitar owned by a 17-year-old Jimi Hendrix and stolen from him backstage at one of his very first gigs.
Why would it be so valuable?
Would it be because Hendrix is at the top of every list of history's greatest guitarists?
Well, that's a big part of it.
But the other part is because Hendrix died so very young.
He was already the highest paid performer in the world, headlining Woodstock, the most famous rock festival in history.
Only one year later, Jimi Hendrix joined that most exclusive of all clubs, the 27 Club, comprised of so many of the greatest rock musicians, all of whom enigmatically died at the age of 27.
Today we're going to look at the 27 Club and see if science can explain why this is such a popular age for rock stars to die.
The 27 Club is generally defined by its most famous members, Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, and Brian Jones.
It might appear that the more famous a young pop musician is, the greater the danger of dying at this most ominous age.
At a glance, one can easily see that it makes a certain amount of sense.
Rock stars often get their start pretty young.
They explode into great fame and wealth before they're old enough to have the sense to know what to do with it.
They engage in risky behavior, and they wind up dead from some drug overdose or suicide or other lifestyle-driven misfortune.
Those lucky enough to survive that turbulent early period gain a bit of wisdom once they make it into their 30s and beyond.
So it's not hard to accept that there might be a peak of the bell curve in young rock star deaths right around the mid to late 20s.
At a high level anyway, it makes logical sense.
But is it true?
The idea of a 27 club has been treated like a real scientific hypothesis and has been put to the test in actual observational studies.
And we can summarize their findings.
First, let's look at the larger picture, and for this we can take the data from one study that looked at over 12,500 performing pop musicians for whom their age at death is known and who died between 1950 and 2014.
Plotting all of their deaths on a chart where the horizontal axis is their age at death, we see that they do form into a nice bell curve, which peaks just below the age of around 60.
Now compare it to the U.S. population at large, with an average age at death of over 77.
This is startling fact number one.
Being a performing pop musician decreases your expected lifespan by nearly 20 years.
The bell curve is not a perfect one either.
Although it trails off on the high side in the nice familiar curve, on the low it does not.
The curve has a distinctive hump, a shoulder, if you will, around the low 30s.
Pop musicians in their early 40s are the ones who seem to have learned their lessons best, and it's only from there on up that we see a relatively normal looking distribution.
But let's look at the very youngest end of the curve.
Once a pop musician hits their teens, that curve of death jumps sharply up and only maintains about even once they hit the age of 30.
It would seem that the 20s are indeed a risky period for this group.
But is there a peak in this data at 27?
Sorry to say, but there is not.
It's about the same as 25 and it's noticeably lower than both 28 and 30.
Musicians in this group only had a 1.3% chance of dying at 27, while the largest number died at the age of 56 with a 2.2% chance.
So why don't we glorify the 56 club?
Data Debunks the Myth 00:08:25
It has its share of VIP members, Eddie Rabbit, Tammy Winnette, Johnny Ramon.
Certainly, one can argue that it's more tragic when someone dies so much younger, but is tragedy really the reason we talk about the 27 club?
Or could it be that there's a ghoulish fascination with young deaths?
Because when you have conversations or read articles about it, they do tend to have more of an urban legend feel to them than they do of sadness.
It's an interesting question and warrants personal contemplation.
In a world that can feel overwhelming, spreading thoughtful, evidence-based content is one of the best ways to make a positive impact.
Ask your local public radio station to air the Skeptoid Files, a 30-minute radio-friendly version of Skeptoid that pairs two related episodes promoting real science, true history, and critical thinking.
And in these challenging times for public media, we're offering these broadcasts for free to radio stations, available on the PRX Exchange or directly from Skeptoid Media.
It's an easy ask.
Just send a quick message to your station's programming director.
By helping to bring the Skeptoid files to the airwaves, you'll help promote the essential skills we all need to tell fact from fiction.
Just go to your local station's website, find the programming director's email address, or just their general email address.
You can even use the telephone.
I know that might sound crazy, it's an old legacy device that allows real-time voice communication.
I know that's weird, but hey, it's an option.
The world can feel chaotic, but you're not powerless.
When you promote critical thinking, you can help your community tell fact from fiction.
And that's how we shape a better future.
In uncertain times, spreading good ideas can make you feel helpful, not helpless.
Let's stand up for reason, truth, and understanding together.
Get them to air the Skeptoid files from Skeptoid Media, available on the PRX Exchange, and they'll know what that is.
It's no coincidence that Kurt Cobain's page on findadeath.com is among the longer ones on the site, which compiles all available documents and photographs and stories pertaining to famous people's deaths.
Other long ones include River Phoenix and James Dean.
Pictures of their death certificates, stories and photos from the people who found them, all kinds of morbid memorabilia can all be found there.
Why?
Is it because they were our greatest stars?
Well, Lawrence Olivier doesn't have a page on that website at all, nor does Aretha Franklin.
Apparently, there's insufficient interest in celebrities, no matter how talented they were, if they died naturally at an old age.
The 27 Club is not about young musicians or famous musicians or dead musicians.
It's about all three.
And the fact that you have to have died very young to be included is why it's a pop culture thing.
It is created by and defined by morbid fascination with young deaths.
And this is skeptoid, so this shouldn't surprise you.
There is science behind this.
It is actually normal and expected for people to have a fascination with novel deaths, as well as other stimuli.
It's called optimal stimulation theory, and it posits that each of us has a certain level of stimulation that we need.
According to our own individual levels of need, we engage in stimulus-seeking behavior.
And plenty of papers have been written on the topic.
Healthy people sometimes get bored, and seeking out conventional distractions is something we'd all do.
But taking it a bit further, people who suffer from feelings of powerlessness or alienation tend to both need and seek out higher levels of stimulation and take an interest in novel deaths.
In one experiment conducted nearly half a century ago, students at San Jose State University were given three standardized tests, the Pearson boredom scale, the Dean Alienation Scale, the Sensation Seeking Scale, and then another test developed especially for the study, the Death and Violence Interest Questionnaire.
The questions were all mixed together and randomized.
The significant result to come out of the data was that a combination of high boredom and high alienation together was necessary to result in a high interest in novel deaths.
To quote from the paper, The more one is bored with and alienated from his surroundings, the greater his interest in a novel and arousing topic such as death.
It's almost eerie how closely this matches the stereotypical portrayal of one interested in deaths, that of the bored alienated loner living in his parents' basement and pulling the wings off flies.
So with at least one explanation for why the 27 Club exists, despite it not being statistically significant, are we left with any mystery at all?
Not really.
Although the list of rock stars who died at 27 is shorter than some of the other lists right near it on the age spectrum, there are definitely more superstars on the 27 list.
But really, by definition, some age has to have the most superstars.
That's the very nature of random data.
The rest of the superstars who died in their 20s are scattered in other years.
Buddy Hawley, Selena, Tupac Shakur, Otis Reding, Sid Vicious, the Big Bopper.
It might be just as noteworthy to die at an age other than 27.
But it's also important to point out that if you want the biggest of the big names, almost all of them died later in life.
Hendricks and Joplin and Cobain were big, but they weren't John Lennon, Little Richard, David Bowie, Prince, Eddie Van Halen, Aretha Franklin.
But I'm just going to stop right there for fear of triggering a debate over making lists of who's great.
And so while it turns out there's nothing interesting about the idea of a 27 club, it still brings an important takeaway, a very important takeaway.
It is that pop musicians have a much higher risk of death during their younger decades than they would if they weren't musicians.
This is something that every agent, manager, family member, friend, and bandmate should be aware of.
Nearly all of the famous deaths in the 27 Club, the 28 Club, and all the other clubs were preventable.
There's very little value in studying the reasons behind these clubs, if not ultimately, to keep more people from joining them.
Young musicians and pop stars are a high-risk group, and it's the promise of awareness and support and intervention from those closest to them that is the only potential positive outcome from this episode.
As researcher Diana Kinney wrote, Across the seven decades studied, popular musicians' lifespans were up to 25 years shorter than the comparable U.S. population.
Accidental death rates were between 5 and 10 times greater.
Suicide rates were between 2 and 7 times greater.
And homicide rates were up to 8 times greater than the U.S. population.
The music industry needs to consider these findings to discover ways of recognizing and assisting young musicians in distress.
At the very least, those who make their living from these young people need to learn to recognize early signs of emotional distress, crisis, depression, and suicidality, and to put some support systems in place to provide the necessary assistance and care.
Support Our Educational Mission 00:02:48
Please don't ever look at the 27 Club as a fun, spooky mystery.
It's really just a minor coincidence in random data.
Data of the most heartbreaking and dire kind.
In the ad-free and extended premium feed, we continue with some unexpected applications of optimal stimulation theory and how it applies to the marketing of products.
To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.
A great big skeptoid shout out to our premium supporters like Aaron and Lisa Tolin, Lucas from the Science on Top podcast, Randy Edwards, and Johnny Pockets, the winningest golfer at OBX.
A prideful title to be sure.
Remember, Skeptoid is a 501c3 educational nonprofit.
We depend on your monthly micropayments to keep this content available to all the people out there who need it.
Join us in this mission.
Just come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
And while you're there, get the Skeptoid books.
They make great bathroom reading and they're awesome gifts for people who don't listen to podcasts.
Get them in our online store at skeptoid.com/slash store.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From P R X
Export Selection