Live Fast Die Young

I want my pop stars spectacular! I adore Courtney Love, Elton John, Lady Gaga, Britney and Boy George.  I loathe Leona Lewis and all the other boring X-Factor wannabes, including the judges. And I’m not alone. We are all fascinated when the pop stars go into meltdown. There’s a website where you can guess when Britney is going to die and no matter how much we burn the candle from both ends ourselves, there’s rarely any sympathy found for the “poor millionaire pop stars” and their addictions.

So it’s not really a surprise that a study done in Liverpool John Moores University shows that rock stars drop dead younger than the rest of us. But to find out that the life expectancy of an European pop star is only 35 years, sounds rather harsh. The yanks don’t do much better: a North American star can expect to die at 42 years of age.

The study looked at 1050 musicians, that had featured in the All Time Top 1000 albums list between 1956 and 1999, covering rock, pop, funk, R&B, electronica and new age genres. It found stars were more than twice as likely to die early and even more likely to die within five years of becoming famous. About 25 years after shooting to fame, European stars returned to the same levels of life expectancy as the general population while North American stars continued to experience higher death rates.

The main reason for the premature death of a pop star is obviously consumption of too much drugs and/or alcohol. I find the whole thing utterly depressive. Not that I really want to be a pop star but I know that if I was, I would definitely consume too much drugs and/or alcohol. But to die in your mid thirties? That’s so last season.

And I’m not the one to preach to the kids (or adults) what to do and think, but isn’t it just a tad questionable that the pop royalties are still being presented to us as role models? And don’t go saying they haven’t chosen that role. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t be selling shampoo to us. 

Britney's back!

Elton John in his heyday, you got to love the look!