November 4, 2024
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The myth that musicians die at 27 shows how superstitions are created
Celebrities who die at the age of 27, such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Amy Winehouse, are made even more famous by the myths surrounding that number. This is an example of how modern folklore emerges.
Eduardo Kobra’s 27 Club mural at 170 Forsyth Street and Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of New York City.
Edward Westmacott/Alamy Stock Photo
Sociologist Zachary Dunivin, now at the University of California, Davis, was watching a movie about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat when something in the epilogue caught his attention. The caption states that Basquiat died of a drug overdose at the age of 27. Dunivin felt that something about this particular age seemed to lend added weight to the tragedy of Basquiat’s death, and he quickly understood why. “27 Club”. There is a widespread belief that celebrities, especially musicians, are disproportionately likely to die at the age of 27.
film, Basquiat Dunivin wondered how the myth of the 27 Club spread and what it meant to those caught up in it. new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences In the paper, he provides some answers. It was found that the existence of the club caused more attention to be paid to those who died at the age of 27, creating a positive feedback loop that reinforced both the power of the legend and the prestige of those affiliated with the club. . related to.
“The strange thing about this myth is that even if you don’t know about the 27 Club, you’ll encounter a much more famous dead man who died at the age of 27,” Dunivin says. “We make this myth seem true because the reality is that more people are dying at age 27.”
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The idea that particularly talented people are more likely to die early dates back to ancient times. As the Greek playwright Menander said in the 4th century B.C., “He whom the gods love dies young.”
But the idea that musicians, artists, actors, and other creative people are particularly likely to die at age 27 emerged more recently, after a series of high-profile deaths in the early 1970s. From 1969 to 1971, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison each died at that age. Coincidentally, these rock stars were all symbols of the counterculture movement, and their first and last deaths occurred two years apart from that date. “We are meaning-making machines. That’s what we do as humans,” Dunivin says. “If you look at that, you’ll say, ‘There can’t be any coincidences!'”
The fact that people were so fixated on this particular group of deaths in the 1970s is somewhat justified, given how unusual it was, Dunivin continued. A new paper calculates that the odds of four 27-year-olds at the top of Wikipedia’s celebrity list, or “true superstars” in the list’s 99.9th percentile, are extremely high: 1 in 100,000. says Dunivin.—He will die within two years.
He added that the myth’s popularity has been revived and strengthened over the years by the headline-grabbing deaths of 27-year-old celebrities such as Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Dunivin did not aim to debunk the myth itself, something that had already been done by another group of researchers in 2011. Instead, he wanted to find out how the legend, born of a random but “really strange” series of events, came to have such an impact. He made an impact on the real world by shaping the legacies of other celebrities who have since died at the age of 27.
To get their data, Dunivin and co-author Patrick Kaminski, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Stuttgart in Germany, looked at a database of famous people, including nearly everyone with a Wikipedia page in every language. Aimed. They limited their analysis to people born after 1900 and died before 2015, leaving 344,156 people. The researchers used the number of page visits as a proxy for fame.
The statistical model they used reaffirmed that celebrities had no increased risk of dying at age 27. But among people above the 90th percentile of fame, those who died at age 27 experienced an unexplained rise in popularity because of other factors. This effect was particularly pronounced among the most famous of celebrities, or individuals who reached approximately the 99th percentile of fame. This bump suggests that people who die at age 27 are “significantly more likely to become famous” than those who die at age 26 or 28, Dunivin said.
Cultural myths are generally “very difficult to study empirically,” says Omar Rizard, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. However, by using a “clever” approach, Dunivin and Kaminsky “provide a lot of circumstantial evidence that this phenomenon is real and that artists who died around that age receive more attention and notoriety.” “I did a good job,” he says.
Timothy Tangarrini, a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study, calls it a “major contribution” to so-called computational folklore.
The authors were able to “leverage sophisticated statistical models and new data to understand the feedback mechanisms of beliefs, stories, and their impact on the real world,” Tanherlini said. “Ultimately, we provide a mechanism for understanding how these young musicians rose to fame posthumously through the emergence of a collaborative narrative that clearly resonated with fans and the broader public.” I will.”
