Do musicians die young? The truth about the 27 Club

For whatever grisly reason, people are fascinated by musicians’ deaths. Part of it, doubtless, is the feeling that those who love someone’s music feel they also somehow know the maker of the music. Part of it is that musicians’ deaths make news, whereas the death of the old chap in the flat over the road barely registers outside his immediate family and friends. And part of it is that musicians seem unusually prone to headline-worthy deaths – murder, suicide, overdose, plane crash.

Even the most studious people find themselves getting facetious on the subject of musicians’ deaths. Greil Marcus, rarely a critic to roll out the lolz, devoted a 1979 Village Voice article – which you can find in his un-lolz-ily titled collection In the Fascist Bathroom – to ranking the deaths of various stars, giving points according to past contribution to music, future contribution and manner of rock death.

Now, though, the subject of the music death has been subjected to academic rigour. Over at theconversation.com, Dianna Theodora Kenny – professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney – has published a series of articles studying musicians’ causes of death. In her first article she studied the deaths of 12,665 musicians who died between 1950 and June 2014, to look at their longevity and the proportion of deaths caused by suicide, murder and injury or accident. And, as the table below shows, musicians are much more likely to die in one of those ways than non-musicians.

Photograph: Dianna Theodora Kenny/theconversation.com

In her second piece, Kenny looked at the myth – and it is a myth – of the “27 Club”, the name given to the group of musicians who have died aged 27, including Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix, which has driven the belief that somehow the age of 27 is imbued with a mystical horror for those who make music. In fact, Kenny shows, more musicians have died aged 28 than 27 – and the commonest age for them to die is 56. It’s just there were more famous people among the 27 cohort, and their deaths were particularly notable in manner.

Now Kenny has examined cause of death by genre. And it rather suggests that certain types of music carry certain specific types of risk. It’s not perfect research – nowhere does she explain how she has differentiated between rap and hip-hop as genres, for example – but there are fairly obvious patterns. Some of them are hardly surprising: hip-hop musicians are much more likely to be murdered than those in any other genre. The oldest genres – blues, jazz, country – have the highest rate of musicians succumbing to heart-related illness and cancer (in 50 years’ time, hip-hop’s stats will start to reflect the many rappers who manage not to get murdered and make it through to old age). And metal and punk are, by massive margins, the styles in which musicians are most likely to suffer accidental deaths (which includes crashes and overdoses). Metal, too, has an issue with suicide: almost one in five dead metal musicians took their own life, whereas the God-fearing folk of gospel are the least likely to kill themselves.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what – if anything – we can learn from all this, aside from perhaps getting a heads-up that pursuing a career in music could be hazardous. But it’s fascinating stuff. And to any musicians reading this: take care!

Photograph: Dianna Theodora Kenny/theconversation.com