"Thinking about the 27 club as I approach 26" by DT McCrea

Kurt Cobain died in April of 1994 twenty-one days before I was born. We look for patterns
everywhere. When he died it sparked a conversation about his age, twenty-seven, because fans
noticed it was the same age that Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were
when they all died within two years of each other over two decades earlier.

My favorite picture of Kurt Cobain is one of him wearing a crown of pink roses. For some this
might signal some spiritual connection to that earlier age in rock history when hippies adorned in
flower crowns could be found at festivals like Woodstock. For me though it’s a reminder of how
Cobain was vocal through his whole career in his support of the queer community—going so far
as to tell any potential homophobes who bought his album that he hated them if even they liked
him in the liner notes. And a reminder of how Cobain spoke openly about questioning his own
sexuality in adolescence and used to go around Aberdeen, Washington spray painting God is
Gay.

When Amy Winehouse died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 it brought back public interest in the
supposed twenty-seven club. Since then the club has been expanded to include not just
musicians but actors and other celebrities who also died at that age. This expansion really serves
to undermine the idea that there’s some tragic cosmic force at play here. What started as an
observation about a coincidence among the age of musicians whose lives were cut short then
expanded to include other famous figures in order to create more data points to point to and say
see, there’s really something to this. It’s motivated by a desire to make meaning out of events
that we can’t understand or accept. But I’m not really interested in patterns or how are brains are
trained to look for them. I’m interested in the same thing as everyone else I guess, death.

I used to sit in my room as a teenager and scream along with Kurt as he’d yelp out You Know
you’re right over and over. For sure there was some over dramatic teen angst in this picture of
me in my room, feeling overwhelmed by things I’d be able to see in a few years as trivial. But
there was more that made me feel connected to Cobain then other angry singers I’d scream along
with. I didn’t know I was queer yet, and didn’t know about Cobain’s defense of the queer
community, but I could sense in his voice and his lyrics a kind of softness made jagged by a
harsh and hateful world. There was something else I felt in him too.

The reason twenty-seven seems so significant isn’t just because of the coincidence of multiple
public figures dying at that age—if someone noticed a bunch of musicians all died when they
were eighty-one nobody would talk about an eighty-one club—twenty-seven is young, to many
people it’s incredibly, tragically young. But when I would sit and listen to Cobain’s pained voice
as a teenager, knowing he died in his twenties, I would wonder if he too spent his whole life with
this sense that he wasn’t gonna be around for long. I wonder now about all the members of the
twenty-seven club—whether they took their own lives like Cobain, or died from overdose, or
even sudden accidents—if they struggled to imagine themselves as old or even middle-aged. I
wonder if twenty-seven ever sounded very young to them at all.

In a bit of serendipity, as I approach my twenty sixth birthday in two months, I’ve just recently
discovered a song that was written over three years ago. Anymore by THICK. Lately I’ve been
singing along to it every day I’m twenty-six / so sick of this / I’m not a kid / anymore.

DT McCrea is a trans anarchist poet living in Akron Ohio. Their work can be found at Honey and Lime and Taco Bell Quarterly. In their free time DT enjoys contemplating the nature of the universe and plotting the downfall of capitalism.