November 4, 2024
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The myth that musicians die at 27 shows how superstitions are made
Famous people who die at 27, such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, are even more famous because of the mythology surrounding that number, an example of how modern folklore is born.
Eduardo Kobra’s “27 club” mural at 170 Forsyth Street and Rivington Street in New York’s Lower East Side.
Edward Westmacott/Alamy Stock Photo
Zackary Dunivin, now a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, was watching a film about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat when something in the epilogue caught his attention. Basquiat, the explanatory text said, died of a drug overdose at the age of 27. Dunivin thought something about that age added weight to the tragedy of Basquiat’s death, and he immediately realized why: Basquiat was a member of the group. “27 Club“. This widespread myth says that famous people, especially musicians, die at the unusual age of 27.
movie, basquiat, He asked Dunivini how the myth of the 27 Club spreads and what it means to the people it captures. In a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America the paper himself gives some answersDue to the existence of the club, more attention is given to people who die at the age of 27, which creates a positive opinion, which strengthens the power of the legend and the popularity of those concerned.
“The strange thing about this particular myth is that even if you don’t know about the 27 Club, you come across more famous people who died at 27,” Dunivin says. “We’ve shown this myth to be true because it actually looks like more people dying at age 27.”
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The fact that particularly talented people are prone to untimely deaths dates back to ancient times. As the Greek dramatist Menander stated in the fourth century BC, “He who is loved by the gods dies young.”
The fact that musicians, artists, actors and other creative people are more likely to die at exactly 27 years old, however, emerged recently, following a series of high-profile deaths in the early 1970s. Between 1969 and 1971, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison each died at that age. Coincidentally, these rock stars were icons of the counterculture movement, and their first and last deaths occurred two years to the day. “We’re meaning-making machines—that’s what we do as humans,” Dunivin says. “You look at that and say, ‘It can’t be a coincidence!'”
People’s fixation on that particular group of deaths in the 1970s is somewhat justified, Dunivin continues, because of how unusual it was. In the new paper, he calculated a steep slope in 100,000 chances of four 27-year-olds at the top of a list of famous people on Wikipedia — 99.9% of the list. percentile, “real superstars”, as Dunivin says.—he would die within two years.
The myth’s popularity has been revived and strengthened over the years, he added, by the deaths of other celebrity headliners at 27, including Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Dunivin didn’t want to destroy the myth itself, that’s for sure it’s already done by another group of researchers in 2011. Instead, a legend that arose out of a series of random but “really weird” events was intended to shape the legacies of other famous people who later died with an impact on the real world. at 27
To get the data, Dunivin and his co-author Patrick Kaminski, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Stuttgart in Germany, turned to a database of notable people, which includes almost everyone with a Wikipedia page in every language. They limited the study to people born after 1900 and died before 2015, leaving 344,156 people. The researchers used page views as a proxy for popularity.
The statistical models they used confirmed that there is no increased risk of death for famous people at the age of 27. Among those in the 90th percentile of popularity and above, however, those who died at age 27 had an additional increase in popularity that could not be accounted for. due to other factors. The effect was particularly pronounced for the most famous, or people who scored at approximately the 99th percentile of popularity. That bump indicates that people who die at 27 are “significantly more likely to be famous” than those who die at 26 or 28, Dunivin says.
Cultural myths, in general, “are very difficult to analyze empirically,” says Omar Lizardo, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the work. But using an “intelligent” approach, Dunivin and Kaminski “did a good job of providing a lot of evidence that the phenomenon is real and that artists who die around that age get more attention and fame.”
Timothy Tangherlini, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research, calls this so-called computational folklore “a major contribution.”
The authors succeed in “leveraging sophisticated statistical models and new data to understand the feedback mechanisms of belief, storytelling, and their real-world effects,” says Tangherlini. “Ultimately, in death, these young musicians offer a mechanism for understanding the rise in popularity—due to an unusual coincidence of time—for the creation of a coordinating narrative that resonated clearly with fans and the general public.”
