Those of us who’ve long suspected that driving a sports car at 180 mph and swigging Jack Daniels while injecting yourself with an insanely potent cocktail of smack, crack, Viagra, speed and ground-up baby chimp adrenal glands is perhaps not the healthiest lifestyle possible have finally been vindicated.
Scientists at Liverpool’s John Moores University have published a report revealing that American rockers die, on average, at age 42. Their slightly crazier European cousins check out at a way more impressive 35.
Why are American rockers such wusses? It comes down to Northern Europe’s insane binge-drinking culture. From London to Dublin, from Rotterdam to Reykjavik, every Friday and Saturday night, millions of berserker euro-Viking scum engage in a debauched Boschian orgy of drunkenness, casual sex, drug-taking and mindless violence. It’s the norm.
That’s what European rock stars are up against. Take Britain’s current obsession with naughty popsters Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Pete Doherty. In the U.S. these kids would be seen as pathetic losers. In Britain smacking photographers, throwing up in public, snorting coke off pub tables, engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation in the toilets and screaming at total strangers isn’t considered scandalous. It’s a good night out.
So Euro-rockers live in a culture where librarians and accountants live lives more outrageous, exciting and dangerous than those of the most deranged American rock stars. That’s why Euro-rockers have to try so much harder. And why they die years earlier than their American peers.
But the good news that most rock stars are popping clog long before they get really old, smelly and embarrassingly incompetent (like mumbling Bob Dylan) is tempered by the horrific news (contained in the same report) that some rock stars are actually starting to live longer.
The scientists were shocked to discover that since 1980, only 1.5 percent of musicians have died within five years of their first hit. Compared to more than twice that percentage before 1980. So future teenagers will have to endure even more embarrassing reunion tours by aging rockers who refuse to die while they’re still vaguely attractive.
What’s to blame for the ever-worsening glut of moldy old rockers? Seat belts, air bags and rehab have played their part. But could it also be that fewer and fewer rockers are selling their souls to the devil?
On the av1611.org/rockdead website, under the quote “The fear of the LORD prolongeth days: but the years of the wicked shall be shortened. (Proverbs 10:27),” you’ll find, neatly laid out, the names of more than 300 daisy-pushing rocks stars and the cause of their demise.
There you’ll find the real reason rockers die an estimated 38.9 years before the rest if us. Satan. And he doesn’t mess around. Using means as diverse as diabetes (Mathew Ashman of Bow Wow Wow, 35) and drowning (Jeff Buckley, 30), the devil has a nasty habit of collecting early on those musicians whom he has given talent in return for their souls. When Freddie Mercury (AIDS, 45) sang “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me, for meeeeeee,” he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.
But science might have the last laugh. Recent advances in robotics have led some to predict that it will soon be possible to “download” people into artificial bodies. Imagine it—a world in which Sting and Phil Collins and Sir Paul live forever. In what way could hell be worse than that?