Club 27: A myth with real consequences

In the early 1970s, music icons Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison all died within two years of each other. They were all 27 years old. They quickly became part of "Club 27"—a cultural myth suggesting that the age of 27 poses a particularly high risk for musicians and other pop-culture icons. Decades later, Club 27 is still an integral part of our culture, most recently fueled by the deaths of Kurt Cobain (1994) and Amy Winehouse (2011) - both died at the age of 27. Can this really be just a coincidence?

Since then, the mortality risk among famous individuals has been widely studied. “There is no increased risk of dying at the age of 27 compared to 26 or 28,” says Patrick Kaminski.

Together with his US research colleague Zackary Okun Dunivin, the Stuttgart-based sociologist looks at Club 27 from a completely different perspective: “The interesting question for us is not whether the myth is true. It's not true, as many researchers before us have already shown,” says Kaminski, who conducts research in the field of computational social science at the Institute of Social Sciences. "We found it far more intriguing to explore why the 'Club 27' remains so prevalent even today and how this myth shapes cultural perceptions."

Kaminski and Dunivin analyzed a Wikipedia dataset of famous personalities. Unsurprisingly, 27-year-old celebrities do not have a higher mortality risk than comparable age groups. What is particularly intriguing, however, is the finding that through their analysis, the two researchers demonstrated that individuals who die at the age of 27 tend to achieve significantly higher levels of fame. It was also noticeable that within the group of 27-year-olds, musicians were even more famous than actors, for example.

Wikipedia click data provides clues as to why this is the case. There are collective pages on Club 27 in eleven languages, with links to its members. Traffic to personal profiles is driven partly by these pages and partly by search engine queries. Even without these pages, the artists who died at 27 achieved greater fame than comparable colleagues from the industry. “This shows us that Club 27 has spread across a wide range of cultures and has become a strong cultural narrative,” explains Kaminski.

This also means that the myth has now become a cultural phenomenon in its own right. As expressed by the Thomas Theorem, a sociological theory: "If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." A similar mechanism to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“The fact that people continue to talk about Club 27 as if it were real means that this myth remains part of our cultural memory,” says Kaminski. Researchers refer to this process as memetic reification. They also see stigmergy at play. This concept suggests that a person's actions leave traces in their environment, which others then interpret and use as guidance for their own actions. A common example is the informal footpaths that emerge off the main trails, indicating a shortcut or quicker route. Applied to Club 27, this means that the existence of the Wikipedia collection pages contributes to users increasingly clicking on personalities listed there.

Alongside these established "paths", the unlikely explanation behind the myth explains why it arose. Only the rare occurrence of four young musicians all dying at the same age provide the conditions for the myth to emerge.“ Based on our data, we estimate the probability of such an event at 1 in 100,000,” says Kaminski.

“With our study, we were able to show that the cultural impact of Club 27 has endured for generations and continues to fascinate people to this day,” says Kaminski. The example of Club 27 also shows how a cultural phenomenon can take on a life of its own from an unlikely event. The example of "Club 27" demonstrates how an unlikely event can evolve into a lasting cultural phenomenon, taking on a life of its own.

What is certain, however, is that it is precisely such myths that help us to develop cultural patterns and thus to categorize events for which there is no plausible explanation, and which are ultimately based on coincidences. They also illustrate how cultural perception works and what meaning we attribute to historical events. 

Publication
Dunivin, Zackary Okun and Kamniski, Patrick: Path dependence, stigmergy and memetic reification in the formation of the 27 Club myth. In: Proceeding of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), 121, Nr. 46, November 4, 2024, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2413373121.