A reckless life, but a little more. But in a state of balance and more fragile. The stress of success killed the famous singerespecially those who don’t have a band around them and therefore emotional support and a team. Soloist and loner. Famous singers died about five years earlier than those out of the spotlight, according to a new analysis of some of the 20th century’s biggest stars in Europe and North America. Poor privacy, intense public exposure, exhausting pace and stress can trigger mental health problems and harmful coping strategies that contribute to shortening lifespan. Fame is emerging as a “chronic burden that magnifies existing occupational risks,” say researchers at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. “This is worrying because it suggests that famous musicians are actually at risk of premature death,” Michael Dufner, professor of personality, psychology and diagnostics at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany and senior author of the study, told the Guardian. On average, their lifespan was 4.6 years shorter. Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Lord, George Michael And Keith Flint the stars are taken as an example. But the thinking also goes in that direction Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Jimi HendrixThe same Freddie Mercury.
STUDIES
To investigate whether fame had any influence on the risk of premature death, Dufner and his colleagues identified 324 famous soloists and matched them with 324 other lesser-known musicians of the same age, gender, nationality, ethnicity and musical genre. To ensure a reasonable number of deaths, they focused on artists active between 1950 and 1990. The stars were selected from the international ranking of the “2000 Greatest Artists of All Time” from the acclaimedmusic.net database. Most of the singers are white male rockers from America. Only 19% were black and 16.5% were women. The oldest was born in 1910 and the youngest in 1975. More than half played in a band. But when researchers looked at who died and at what age, a clear trend emerged: Famous singers typically lived to be 75, while their less famous counterparts, on average, lived to 79. Being in a band was associated with a 26% lower risk of death than being a solo artist, but overall, famous singers were still 33% more likely to die in the years studied than their less famous counterparts.
Suspicion
The increased risk of death emerged only after singers achieved fame, reinforcing suspicions that fame itself was a cause of premature death. Details of the study were published in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. Now research is focusing on why fame can cause premature death in singers. Isolation from friends and family, even an unhealthy lifestyle while touring, the normalization of alcohol and drug abuse can take its toll. Sally Anne Gross of the University of Westminster and co-author of the book “Can Music Make You Sick?: Measuring the Price of Musical Ambition,” explains that the research focuses on the highly competitive world of music production, which is now dominated by social media and where fame “serves to isolate individuals: fame, it seems, is poison.” In fact, according to the researchers, being famous increases the risk of premature death: a risk comparable to other known factors, such as occasional smoking. There is the issue of the pressures of the music industry along with the lifestyle and weight of fame, which would lead to real pathogenic factors.
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