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Uncognitive

Uncognitive

Brooklyn, NY
May 2003

SEP 14, 2007 12:29 PM



At this point, I think we all have to admit that science is pretty awesome.

I mean, it’s brought us the electric light, internet tubes, the theremin, LSD and cyborg monkeys that can move objects with their minds. What else do you want?

I mean, unless you’re one of those neo-Luddite squares who whine about “unforeseen negative consequences” and “possible damage to the environment” and all that other crap. Wow, you’re so going to regret your science-hatin’ ways when I unleash my secret army of telekinetic robo-chimps and chortle as they use their turbo-charged monkey brainwaves to burst your skull open like an over-ripe banana, Scanners-style. I mean, what could possibly be the unforeseen negative consequences of that?

Of course, just because science can be awesome, doesn’t mean it’s consistently awesome. Like all great artists, sometimes scientists can’t summon forth enough inspiration and resort to phoning that shit in.

As an example, let me present a soon-to-be-published research study from the fine folks at the Liverpool John Moore University’s Centre For Public Health, entitled “Elvis To Eminem”, that comes to the shocking conclusion that being a rock star just might not be the healthiest career choice a young person can make.

Yes, in case you’ve ever disputed the scientific accuracy of the rock ‘n’ roll motto “Live Fast, Die Young”, now it has been statistically proven!

Alas, not the “Live Fast” part, since apparently it’s either difficult to gauge the airspeed velocity of the average unladen rock musician, or the researchers assumed that Hüsker Dü’s “Land Speed Record” was actually a previous thesis on the subject.

Focusing instead on the “Die Young” part, the researchers started out with a UK list of what are supposedly the All Time Top 1,000 Albums compiled in 2000. They then tallied up all the various North American and European musicians from “the mainstream popular categories of rock, punk, rap, R&B (rhythm and blues), electronica and new age” that appeared on said list, excluding for no apparent reason “those from the music genre classifications of country, blues, jazz, vocal, celtic, folk, bluegrass and spoken word”.

I’m sure you fans of Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Robert Johnson, Hank Williams and Bill Hicks will be pleased to know that, scientifically speaking, they are not as important as The Backstreet Boys.

After establishing their cohort of 1064 famous or semi-famous musicians (and you know something’s all good and sciencey when you can use words like “cohort”, not to mention phrases like “offset transposition matrix”), they established which of them were dead, when and how they died, and how long they’d been famous. They then compared those statistics to the average life expectancy for the general population and discovered the following paradigm-shifting fact:

”Pop stars can suffer high levels of stress in environments where alcohol and drugs are widely available, leading to health-damaging risk behaviour.”



Those “health-damaging risk behaviours”, such as flying in airplanes or being a drummer for Spinal Tap, mean that famous musicians are around 1.7 times more likely to die than your average schmuck. So the next time your crappy band plays a show in some lousy dive bar in front of five disinterested drunks and one snarky hipster fuck yelling “Freebird!”, don’t think of it as a sign that you perhaps shouldn’t have dropped out of college to pursue your dreams of rock stardom, but instead as an indicator that you’re scientifically 1.7 times less likely to suddenly fall over dead than the dudes in Nickelback.

One of the interesting quirks of this study is the disparity between survival rates for American and European rock stars. Statistically, becoming a famous musician in Europe lowers your survival rate dramatically…to that of the average American.

So if you’re reading this article in, say, England, and are wrestling with the age-old dilemma “Should I become a massively famous rock superstar and live a life of Caligulaesque decadence, playing sold-out arena shows and getting stoned to the gills on a plethora of drugs while being sexually serviced in cartoonishly improbable ways by at least five adoring groupies at a time every night, or should I play it safe and become an accountant?”, rest assured that option #1 is, scientifically speaking, as dangerous to your health as moving to Nebraska and shopping at Wal-Mart.

Even better, if you manage to survive being a famous European rock star for over 25 years, your survival rate improves past that of the average American of the same age, while the survival rate for American rock stars declines ever faster. The researchers conducting this study advance a few theories as to why, such as American rock stars performing more “nostalgic or reunion tours” (and I admit, if I had to spend most of my evenings performing “Keep On Lovin’ You” at various state fairs, I’d yearn for the sweet embrace of death as well) or the disparity between the American and European health care systems leaving impoverished American musicians more at risk of not having health insurance as they get on in years. Of course, the continued existence of Keith Richards alone could have skewed the results.

While this study may be of dubious practical value, at least it deals with actual human beings. Unlike a previous UK study that dealt with the survival rates of British soap opera characters.

No, not British soap opera actors, British soap opera characters.

In case you were wondering how dangerous it really is to be a fictional character on a British soap opera, science has the answer!

”Characters in soap operas lead very dangerous lives. Their lives are more dangerous even than those of Formula One racing drivers or bomb disposal experts. People suffering from many forms of cancer and other serious diseases have better five-year survival rates than do these characters.”



Cynics may scoff at how laughably pointless it is to research the mortality rates of fictional characters on soap operas, even if it’s done all science-like using “Kaplan-Meier survival curves and Cox regression, with age as a time dependent covariate”, but that just means they can’t ask themselves the big, important science questions:

”Could the exaggerated portrayal of these violent and dangerous lives be contributing to our distorted national perceptions about violent crime and death?"



Yes, without our pal science, the entire British national perception of violent crime and death would continue to be distorted! Without this valuable research, mankind would have to survive without

”…the first quantitative estimate of the size of the pinch of salt which should be taken when watching soap operas.”



The horror!

Uncognitive was going to write a soap opera about rock stars until he discovered that, scientifically, all of the characters would have to die during every episode.


SockPuppet

SockPuppet

I'm lost
July 2006

SEP 14, 2007 04:59 PM

Why is this science?

I'm serious. This is statistics, not science.

Alz

Alz

Lincoln, NE
February 2007

SEP 14, 2007 05:05 PM



So if you're reading this article in, say, England, and are wrestling with the age-old dilemma "Should I become a massively famous rock superstar and live a life of Caligulaesque decadence, playing sold-out arena shows and getting stoned to the gills on a plethora of drugs while being sexually serviced in cartoonishly improbable ways by at least five adoring groupies at a time every night, or should I play it safe and become an accountant?", rest assured that option #1 is, scientifically speaking, as dangerous to your health as moving to Nebraska and shopping at Wal-Mart.



Obviously, someone has never tried to live through a day after Thanksgiving sale at the Walmart on 27th street. It's amazing more people aren't slaughtered for $20 dvd players.

Gerry_D

Gerry_D

Los Angeles, CA
May 2003

SEP 14, 2007 05:05 PM

and yet Keithe Richards exists -- proof nature loves balance?

derekdikdik

derekdikdik

Euless, TX
June 2006

SEP 14, 2007 05:13 PM

it's a shame the statistics haven't caught up to the guys in Nickelback.

CategoryError

CategoryError

Delta, BC
September 2006

SEP 14, 2007 06:04 PM

IHateTheLiving said:
it's a shame the statistics haven't caught up to the guys in Nickelback.



+1

_El_Zilcho_

_El_Zilcho_

Framingham, MA
April 2003

SEP 14, 2007 06:43 PM

Thing is, rock just hasn't been around long enough yet. The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith are going to skew the numbers higher eventually.

wereduck

wereduck

I'm lost
July 2007

SEP 14, 2007 06:49 PM

And the public school system over in England has just been advised to LOWER the difficulty of science questions on standardized tests (EDIT: saw this on the Guardian web site). Given that fact, I'm thinking that 'studies' like these are going to become more common in a few years.

puke

Cigarette

Cigarette

Cleveland, OH
April 2004

SEP 14, 2007 07:20 PM

These studies are probably the statisticians' equivalent of a scholar editing Wikipedia articles. A decent way to pass the time doing what they enjoy.

sitar

sitar

Philadelphia, PA
June 2004

SEP 14, 2007 07:58 PM

Over here at the Magic Sitar Institute, we have recently concluded that everybody dies.

Cigarette

Cigarette

Cleveland, OH
April 2004

SEP 14, 2007 07:59 PM

sitar said:
Over here at the Magic Sitar Institute, we have recently concluded that everybody dies.



We here at Neptunes Inc. came to the opposite conclusion, that No one Ever Really Dies.

Runner4406pack

Runner4406pack

Kalamazoo, MI
July 2006

SEP 14, 2007 08:15 PM

SockPuppet said:
Why is this science?

I'm serious. This is statistics, not science.



Statistics is a science, by what definition is it not science?

joker_

joker_

Minneapolis, MN
October 2005

SEP 14, 2007 09:17 PM

Gerry_D said:
and yet Keithe Richards exists -- proof nature loves balance?



You beat me to it. While reading this, all I could think of, but the Rolling Stones are still around. Just another outlier or are they surrounded by a reality distortion field?

Noctua

Noctua

San Francisco, CA
February 2004

SEP 14, 2007 10:41 PM

OK, since everyone's pretty much got a 100% chance of dying, how do rockstars have a 170% chance of dying?

I assume it's referring to dying by a certain age or cause of death, but I'd have to say Rock stars have pretty much the same 100% chance of dying like the rest of us.

Horrorflick

Horrorflick

Detroit, MI
February 2003

SEP 14, 2007 10:43 PM

joker_ said:

Gerry_D said:
and yet Keithe Richards exists -- proof nature loves balance?



You beat me to it. While reading this, all I could think of, but the Rolling Stones are still around. Just another outlier or are they surrounded by a reality distortion field?



Yeah, it's all fun and games until one of them falls and breaks his hip...

boombands

boombands

Summerville, SC
May 2007

SEP 14, 2007 10:59 PM

Noctua said:
OK, since everyone's pretty much got a 100% chance of dying, how do rockstars have a 170% chance of dying?

I assume it's referring to dying by a certain age or cause of death, but I'd have to say Rock stars have pretty much the same 100% chance of dying like the rest of us.



actually im a vampire but that could jsut be the vodka talking and statisically speaking it took me 100 percent longer to type that than usual.

MetaTag

MetaTag

United Kingdom
September 2002

SEP 15, 2007 02:57 AM

There are still enclaves that science has not reached...

... learning is not all about gadgets and things.

Two South African women have been burned to death after a group of students accused them of bewitching their high school with evil spirits.

Students and adults dragged them to a sports field where they were doused with petrol and set alight on Sunday.



Source.

MetaTag

MetaTag

United Kingdom
September 2002

SEP 15, 2007 02:57 AM

double post!

Evilgasm

Evilgasm

Netherlands
April 2007

SEP 15, 2007 03:14 AM



Of course, the continued existence of Keith Richards alone could have skewed the results.



LOL!! biggrin

brett54

brett54

Australia
November 2004

SEP 15, 2007 07:39 AM

I thought getting drunk and choking on your own vomit was ROCK STAR!!!

(please take the holding up of hands with pinky and index finger only extended as written)

Tiger_Fodder

Tiger_Fodder

Braintree, MA
June 2007

SEP 15, 2007 01:49 PM

Despite the fact I totally love Liverpool FC, I never really thought that the actual city of Liverpool was much of a science "centre." In my opinion, the biggest error made in this study is comparing "successful" musicians to the general public. The study does not compare rock musicians, "successful" and "non-successful," with the general public. That would be a more valid comparison. The majority of the "successful" musicians studied are wealthier than the average person, have better access to top-notch health care than the average person and enjoy other perks of being famous and wealthy. All that they are showing is that the rich have it better than the average. tongue

hexfix93

hexfix93

Westminster, CO
June 2005

SEP 15, 2007 01:53 PM

yeah, give up on dreams. don't be a star, be safe.

FUCK THAT. BURN OUT AND SHINE LIKE A FUCKING STAR! its better than being an old washed up useless fart that no one even cares about.

Flux

Flux

SUICIDEGIRL

Georgia, USA

SEP 15, 2007 01:54 PM

BEST TITLE EVER.

Necia

Necia

San Francisco, CA
August 2005

SEP 15, 2007 08:01 PM

hexfix93 said:
yeah, give up on dreams. don't be a star, be safe.

FUCK THAT. BURN OUT AND SHINE LIKE A FUCKING STAR! its better than being an old washed up useless fart that no one even cares about.



Ah, the rolley-eyed face. I'd stop using it, but I keep being presented with situations in which it's just oh so appropriate, y'know?

whatever

meatpieboy

meatpieboy

Korea, D.P.R.
June 2004

SEP 15, 2007 08:38 PM

Necia said:

hexfix93 said:
yeah, give up on dreams. don't be a star, be safe.

FUCK THAT. BURN OUT AND SHINE LIKE A FUCKING STAR! its better than being an old washed up useless fart that no one even cares about.



Ah, the rolley-eyed face. I'd stop using it, but I keep being presented with situations in which it's just oh so appropriate, y'know?

whatever



*kisses*

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