With the recent deaths of notable rock and roll celebrities like David Bowie and Glenn Frey and the repeated news of deaths from the music community on a daily basis, many musicians are starting to ask questions. The most common question is some variant of ‘WTF is going on with musicians?’
The fervor started with the death of Long John Hunter on the 4th of January and hasn’t let up since. We’ve lost such notables as Lemmy Kilminster, Dan Hicks, Maurice White, Paul Katner, and the aforementioned Bowie and Frey. The first two months of 2016 have been horrible for music lovers everywhere. Even the British Ministry of Health has a statistic on musician deaths.
Given this spate of deaths in the music, and specifically Rock & Roll, field, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) should have begun an inquiry into these untimely and deeply personal deaths. Their findings would be exactly what you’d expect. A spokesperson from the CDC, Dr. Katherine Lyon-Daniel, weighed in.
Seriously? No, we have not looked into the rash of musician deaths at all. Why would we? They’re musicians, and probably haven’t necessarily been kind to themselves over the years. Have you ever watched ‘Behind the Music?’ Every single one of those people was addicted to something deadly.
Not content to take that answer we went to the British Ministry of Health. Did you know they don’t have anything even kind of like the CDC over there? Nothing. When diseases strike, and you’re British, you’re just on your own. They don’t track down Typhoid Mary or look for infection vectors, they just shrug their shoulders and drink tea. I suppose they don’t think disease and epidemic safety is a concern over there.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us no closer to an answer, that’s where. We just have to sit around watching our adolescence die, one rocker at a time. The only course of action is to either cryogenically freeze our remaining musicians until the CDC starts taking this seriously, or just have everyone stop being a musician.
