Is the “27 Club” a real thing? Is there a disproportionate number of premature celebrity deaths at this age than others? Has there been any serious research into the matter?
I’ve also started hearing of a 56 Club. Steve Jobs is a member among others.
Well, this article, cited in the Wiki article, which concluded that the 27 club was a myth:
Is 27 really a dangerous age for famous musicians? A retrospective cohort study
Based on Figure 3, it looks like the 31 Club would be a scientifically valid claim.
Qualitatively, I’ve always figured that it was in the late twenties that pop stars start to burn out artistically, and their bodies can’t quite keep on taking the beating of the rock and roll lifestyle without damage.
And the 27 club mystique isn’t so much about the raw numbers of musicians, but the identities of those who bit it at that age. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Cobain are enough to seal the stupid mystique.
My guess would be that it started because that’s the age when Janis, Jimi and Jim (and Brian Jones) kicked the bucket. In a time when you didn’t have the internet it just takes one person to say ‘hey, these people were all 27’ to start a meme. No one pays attention to other ages, but they just keep noticing other people dying at 27, Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, Curt Kobain, some B, C and D listers, a healthy dose of confirmation bias and suddenly you have everyone keeping an eye on every up and coming drugged out rocker that looks like they might not make it through their 20s. If you’re the first one to say their name and “27 Club” in one sentence, you win the prize. 'Course, if you’re wrong, you’re kind of a jerk.
Amy Winehouse just a few years ago kept the meme right on track.
Don’t forget Paul McCartney. The real one, I mean.
Important musicians should be weighted more than others. Kurt Cobain is more culturally significant than, say, Dimebag Daryl.
How would you propose defining “important” and “culturally significant”?
Your inclusion of Cobain highlights how difficult this is. He is certainly important and famous today, but when he was alive, he was close to being a one-hit wonder and could have walked down any street outside a college without getting second glance.
Nirvana had one huge hit album, but only one No. 1 song off that album. Their second album *debuted *at No. 1., but dived quickly and never managed a No. 1 single. Nirvana were moderately famous, but Cobain himself was only a household name amongst the audience for a certain type of college rock.
Contrast that with other ephemeral 90s acts like the Goo Goo Dolls or Savage Garden, that had several No.1 singles off their hit albums and so were objectively more famous and culturally significant than Cobain. Yet I doubt that anyone would consider John Rzeznik or Daniel Jones to be especially famous or culturally significant and, as with Cobain, even at the bands’ peaks only fans of a certain type of music would have recognised their names.
The problem is that simply dying often increases a celebrity’s fame and success. So any measure of “importance” will need to be based on what happened prior to their death. And by that standard, I doubt that Cobain would actually be considered particularly important. If Nirvana’s second album had never performed better than had at the time of his death and the act had never produced another notable album then Cobain would at best be a footnote in some music history book and Nirvana would be appearing on “One hit wonders” lists.
From what I remember of those days Nirvana had a huge following before Cobain’s suicide. They helped usher in an entirely new genre of music into the popular scene, they weren’t a one hit wonder.
And that is exactly the problem with trying to determine “importance”.
From what I remember, Nirvana were a minor component of the alt-music scene. Certainly much less important than the likes of REM or Tori Amos. They were very popular for about 5 minutes, but had a relatively small actual following. Utterly insignificant compared to truly popular acts like Guns n Roses, and less even than the more popular death metal or gangsta rap acts. They really were the equivalent to the Goo Goo Dolls or Savage Garden in my recollection: very popular, a lot or radio play for one song but little in the way of an actual “following”.
On the charts, they had exactly one No. 1 hit. They were objectively less successful than Goo Goo Dolls or Savage Garden.
Whether they ushered in a new style of music is impossible to determine. What style? How did it differ from previous music? What other acts followed them in their style? Was the style Grunge? If so then why are Nirvana given Credit for ushering it in rather than The Scientists, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam or a hundred other possible contenders that predate them or were objectively bigger than them.
If you look at the actual popular music charts, there is little evidence of the effects of Nirvana on the popular scene before Cobain’s death. The charts are full of 80s acts like Bryan Adams, Whitney Houston and Madonna, rap acts, and that strange early 90s folk-ska-soul thing typified by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Arrested Development. Grunge itself was an important element of early 90s music, but not of the popular music scene.
That’s not to say that you’re wrong. Your recollection is probably correct for the group that you were hanging with at the time, the clubs and festivals you went to and so forth. Mine is correct for mine. Which only highlights that recollections can’t be used to determine “importance”.
Which leaves us, as far as I can tell, with objective measures. Record sales before the artist’s death, airplay figures before the artist’s death, important artists who noted the artist as an influence before the artist’s death and so forth. And by those measures Nirvana weren’t any more important than Goo Goo Dolls or Savage Garden as far as I can tell.
And as such Cobain’s death shouldn’t count amongst the important. Which is, of course, silly. Cobain’s death was very important culturally. But trying to disentangle the importance of the artist from the importance of the death is impossible, and any objective attempt suggests that the death far overshadowed the artist. Which is why trying to weight for “importance” is almost impossible, because the act of dying itself can make an obscure artist incredibly famous for a period, and that period can be a week or a lifetime.
I assume we all agree that we can’t just look at artists who are important now who have died at 27 and artists who are important now who didn’t die. That will produce a skewed result because the simple act of dying at 27 makes an artist more likely to be important, assuming they had some degree of fame at the time of their death.
The only way I can see to attempt such a comparison is to look at the objective level of importance of the artist at the time they die and compare that to artists of similar levels of importance who didn’t die. And that is going to lead to Cobain being grouped at the same importance level as John Rzeznik or Daniel Jones.
This is really what I was expecting; statistical results would show that this entire age range was dangerous for young musicians. Thank you.
All I can say is, we remember the 90s very differently. I lived in Seattle in '92 when all the bands that had been playing at the Paramount for years were suddenly breaking nationally. After “Nevermind,” labels were harvesting the Seattle scene the way London and Liverpool were harvested after “She Loves You.” And while REM was the first alt.rock group to have a number 1 album, and Pearl Jam sold more CDs, Nirvana was the band to beat.
Less important than Tori Amos? Her '92 “Crucify” EP had a cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I don’t remember Nirvana covering any of her songs. Their “one hit” was followed up with “All Apologies,” “Rape Me,” “Heat Shaped Box,” “Come As You Are” and “The Man Who Sold The World” (a big radio hit, but not released as a single). Tori, whom I love, has not had as distinguished an output. REM has, but over a much longer period of time. Pearl Jam and the Goo Goo dolls peaked big, but peaked early.