surviving the 27 club

2024-12-31

Cross-posted on Substack.

27's CLUB by Hector Monroy, Mexico (2015)

There’s a je ne sais quoi to pop culture in 2024. Or maybe I’m just not online enough anymore to know what’s up, that makes it different for me than how it was when I was growing up. I mean both can be true. What would also make pop culture “better” for me are a few things: one, nepo babies not being the overwhelming majority of all things new and upcoming, two, the obliteration of TikTok, point blank, and three, if I was still in my naïveté and delusion of thinking my life could be better if I was rich and famous for whatever reason.

Yeah, no, before I figured that I was neurodivergent, that media culture was simply one of my special interests (all or no thanks to my mom, depending on the day), and that money wouldn’t help my impulses but rather enable them for the worse, I learned that fame by itself sucks whether it kills you or not. And in 2006, if you weren’t killing yourself over it, you were either driving with your five-month-old son in your lap, or “acting like a spoiled child” (which is apparently synonymous to “heavily partying to cope with a prematurely lucrative career”), or I don’t know, literally just being on the verge of twenty not knowing what to do with yourself anymore and deciding to “fake” mental illness. All where everyone else could see, whether you liked it or not. You either don’t remember or don’t know what it’s like to be twenty-seven until another one joins that club. Never mind why or how. The lives of the famed are considered more tragic when they end, less if they haven’t yet. This being a spectrum at all where there’s a “lesser of two evils” is so bleak. Like… if that’s already fucked up, what’s everything else?¹

Because the 27 Club is so phenomenal, academic and scientific studies have been conducted to suggest and to prove that it is nothing more than informal, an urban myth. Would its case hold much stronger if almost everyone on that list died by suicide? Hard to say, especially with pop culture existing and persisting because of society’s apophenic tendencies. As someone who is turning twenty-seven in less than a year, I don’t have to be famous to want to kill myself. But I can’t imagine how it isn’t all the more tempting and justified when you are. You see, it’s nothing new when people are quick to contain celebrities within single moments and periods of their lives. Depending on who you ask, Britney Spears is either the Princess of Pop or “finally free” (is she though, truly). Lindsay Lohan did all those iconic movies in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, or is a redheaded hag who has made a recent comeback and not yet resorted to Lifetime movies (but she is on Netflix, so close enough). Amanda Bynes did, too, and now just doesn’t, or never actually did (Gen Alpha, the youngest generation to say “Who the fuck is that?” and stick to it, constantly treats the unknown like they’re people that older generations just made up). And while memoirs can provide more insight to other aspects of their troubled lives, who the hell is reading anymore?²

Honestly though, even with (meaningful) reading out of the equation, we’re still not flippant enough about celebrities. These three notoriously talented and tortured white women born in the 1980s actually have nothing to do with you. Maybe that’s why they’re still alive. If you’ve been at this game, the whole “caring super hard about famous people” shtick, for however long, this much is always true: you forget as quickly as you get involved. They are picking up the pieces that the media frenzy and their own loved ones have left behind whenever you’re not looking, non-fucking-stop. They are really, really good at pretending they aren’t hard-pressed for an end that satiates your morbid curiosity and fascination. Why are we even in this? Parasocial interaction has been going too far; it has caused celebrities to get caught up in drugs, to be murdered by superfans/antis, to make all kinds of stuff up about their personal lives to maintain some ownership outside of their fame, to begrudgingly accept that the fans and media can’t take “no” for an answer.

Chappell Roan is also twenty-seven next year, by the way. While I don’t care to infantilize someone my age with this saccharine “Protect her! She’s so young!” attitude, as fans strangely do with men twice their own, I still very much agree that Roan is entitled to her boundaries. As, y’know, an actual living, breathing person. Her being famous on top of that is like, whatever. This “normal” culture of abuse and harassment that Roan mentioned so casually in this rant, is so commonplace that netizens in the comments, with their usual tunnel vision from the comfort of their stupid couch or bed or publicly parked car, are saying it’s what she signed up for, that “fans being fans” is suddenly considered toxic, etc. Radio silence from the same people the minute they’re subjected to that exact scrutiny. Y’all can’t even talk to your local grocery/retail cashier. The cashier probably can’t and won’t talk either because that’s the culture these days, I guess, but I digress.

Now, by all means this isn’t a rundown of each of the aforementioned women’s careers. If you weren’t following up on any of their generation’s major “flubs” in 2006 then it’s probably because you weren’t infected with the chismosavirus at eight years old, sitting with your mom on an armchair at Barnes & Noble reading tabloids like they were the Bible. I hate that I know any of this, and that the research I’m doing to double check and know even more stuff about it is unfortunately fun for me. But you do your research if you want to. I haven’t lied about anything so far though. You can Google it if you so please, but all you really need to know is that the reason Frankie Muniz, Aaron Carter, and Macaulay Culkin hadn’t been burned at the witch’s stake by mass media for any of their fame-related troubles is the same reason why witches are the ones considered evil and dishonest and dangerous. (I can almost guarantee that people will think of Harry Potter first when prompted by the word “wizard” even though Alex M.F.³ Russo is right there.) What became of Muniz, Carter, and Culkin anyway? Driver, dead, dad. Why can’t it be that simple for Spears, Lohan, and Bynes? Right, because I need a grade.⁴

But in all seriousness, take the 27 Club out of the equation next. More specifically, celebrities who did survive that age and continued to lead prosperous careers but ultimately succumbed to suicide regardless of their sex/gender. Columbia carried out a study in regards to the “suicide contagion” phenomenon that Robin Williams, Kate Spade, and Anthony Bourdain inspired when they died in 2014 and 2018, respectively. One thing that immediately bothered me (and always does, every time something about suicide in this particular country is said) is how the researchers thought they could better understand how to contain suicide ideation and contagion among common people through this study conducted around famous people’s impacts. But it’s an Ivy League institution who did this, so of course they’d publish that. I do know trends don’t lie, and causation does not necessarily mean correlation and all that other statistical and sociological stuff, but Jesus. If celebrities have a track record of hailing from elite institutions before taking off in their careers only to still feel the need to die despite it all, what exactly the fuck does that mean for us?

It’s not just pop culture that has a certain je ne sais quoi in 2024. It’s life being a prison before it is lived. Je ne sais quoi is “late-stage capitalism” in French.⁵ I am so far removed from pop culture in ways that I couldn’t have imagined for myself ten years ago because aside from my frontal lobe fully developing last year, there’s just so much guilt if I enjoy it mindlessly. It’s always been a spectacle; it was never not meant to be. It’s incredibly escapist. Fine, not a crime to want to be, no matter what your choice of poison is. I could live in ignorant bliss if I wanted to. I don’t have to be concerned about how media has treated anyone I mentioned here, or gender disparities that constantly plague the general population more easily than I’m comfortable fathoming, or the tone-deaf credibility and thoughtfulness of a capitalist academy built on the blood of the marginalized. The lives of the famed and the lives of those who aren’t, aren’t on the same spectrum. It’s straight up sad when “good” famous people kill themselves. If I killed myself right now, it’d be everything else before it is sad — a waste, what about your parents, you were about to finish college, I hope you had a good reason to or else it’d really be a waste (you never say this about people who died but didn’t kill themselves, so what makes it okay to say it about someone who did? Like actually). And even if that study I touched on earlier was centered around the phenomenon of mass influence by celebrities, why the fuck wasn’t Columbia intricate enough about more influential factors like homelessness or prolonged stress? Maybe it’s just super difficult to say you have anything to do with the downfall of a group you want nothing to do with. Lol. That makes two of us.

Ultimately, unless we are literally in their personal and professional lives as companions who share mutual, intimate affection and spit, celebrities are not our friends. Even the micro ones from TikTok. And contrary to popular belief, I would like to be sixty-five years old minimum. Despite everyone being annoying forever for any reason, I should be so lucky that I can reach sixty-five, at least without a camera in my face and weird strangers caring fuck all about me. I’m privy to Lori Loughlin paying USC of all places to admit her bimbo daughter (born in 1999) and the dating woes of my internet marketing friend (also born in 1999) and you’re saying I have to choose? My choice of “laughable ‘99er” will be somebody I know personally every single time, because at least then it would be out of affection. In the meantime, I hope everyone who cares about celebrities unironically can heal, so that celebrities can also heal, and phenomena that are less pathetic can resume or assume their rightful place in the pop culture kingdom. Like uh, music that’s not promoted to death as a “sound” on social media. Or catfights but for the lesbian gaze. Celebrities disappearing into their own financially comfortable void without feeling the need to contribute a whole bunch of nothing to stay relevant, even.

#media studies