About twenty years ago I saw a web page from a religious group that was trying to make the case that Rock and Roll was evil. Their reasoning was that God punishes rock stars by killing them off, and the group showed this with a long list of deceased rock stars and their cause of death. They noted that very few of them had died of natural causes, and they claimed that this was because God was punishing them.
To be clear, they weren't just saying that the rock lifestyle is dangerous, so you're more likely to die of, say, an overdose. They were including people like Buddy Holly, who lead a fairly upstanding life and died for what seemed like pure bad luck. They would say the plane crash that killed him was divine retribution.
You might assume that this "proof" was the result of gaming the numbers, but the intriguing thing was that the numbers were real. Rock stars that died early of unnatural causes really did greatly outnumber rock stars that has died of natural causes. So how can this be, if we hang on to the popular assumption that God doesn't really hate rock?
Supposedly this puzzle was actually used by some employers to test applicants' intelligence in interviews, presumably after they were sick of asking why manhole covers are round. To figure it out you have to do some simple math. (And remember that this was twenty years ago.) Let's say you're one of the oldest rock stars there is. Say you were thirty at the birth of rock and roll in the mid-fifties. That would mean you were born in the mid-twenties. So by the time I was reading this web page in the mid-nineties, you would be around seventy. There's no guarantee that you'd still be alive, but you probably would be. And remember, that's just the oldest rock star: in a more typical case, someone who made it big at twenty, in the sixties, would have only been about fifty, and probably not even retired.
Of course, this was twenty years ago. Today, our hypothetical oldest rock star is ninety, and most likely no longer with us. Even that typical sixties rock star is now seventy. The point is that we're entering an era when more rock stars are going to be dying than we're used to.
None of this is supposed to make anyone feel any better about the sudden rash of musician deaths. I'm just noting that the way pop culture has gone, we (meaning anyone likely to be reading this) have been relatively insulated from the deaths of our musical heroes. Obviously, there have been deaths. But they've mostly been both isolated and unusual. For instance, people my age were affected by the death of Kurt Cobain, and it made us think about death in new ways (and possibly for the first time.) But you could still chalk it up to unusual circumstances, or to the peculiarities of mental illness. And it's not like his death was part of a wave that robbed us of all our heroes.
I'm sure earlier generations had similar feelings on the deaths of people like Freddie Mercury, John Lennon, Elvis, and of course Buddy Holly. As well, in my life we've seen giants of music die after long and full careers. Say, Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. But of course, they all seemed to belong to a different era and different genres. You don't think of it the same way when it's not someone you personally listened to.
But now we're finally at the point where rock stars are dying not because they're rock stars, but just because they're human, and that's what we do eventually. For one thing, that means it's going to happen more often now - the start of 2016 has been unfortunate bad luck, but it's the sort of thing that's going to happen more often in the coming years. And it's going to make us think about mortality in ways that the occasional stereotypical live-fast-die-young death wouldn't.
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