Urban Legends: Is humanity just bored or is the truth stranger than fiction?

The 27 Club

This one is a pretty strange but eerily recurring phenomena of prominent musicians, artists and entertainers passing away at the age of 27.

The legend as it is today is traced back all the way to 1969 with the deaths of prominent artist like Brian Jones, Jimmy Hendrix, and Janis Joplin.

While the case for a statistical spike or anomaly can easily be refuted as the number of deaths of people at age 27 does not really stand out as compared to an average life expectancy distribution adjusted for normalizing factors, the case has got highlighted owing to the very high profile and popularity of the supposed victims of the 27 Club.

More recent victims include the Jean Michel Basquiat, Nirvana lead man Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse.

What has stood out is the cause of death with the cases being suicide, drug overdose and other strange circumstances.

So is it being a musician that increases the likelihood of death at 27?

Evidence and research conducted published by the Conversation in 2014 showed that the most likely age of the death of an artist was 56 (at 2.2%) with a 1.3% likelihood of death at 27. So while musicians might have a shorter lifespan compared to civilians there was no augmented likelihood of death at 27 as compared to the ‘Mode’ age of death.

There have also been some noteworthy musicians and artists who have died ‘young’ but not at the age of 27 such as Tupac Shakur, Avicii and Otis Reading.