Worse than dying at 27 - far far worse - is peaking at 27 and then facing a half century or more of a sharp decline in quality

Still touting youthful rebellion - at age 77....

 A half century ago, when most of the Rolling Stone members were around age 27, the band was recording its (a) greatest album or (b) its last great album : either way, EXILE ON MAIN STREET.

People tell me they have done some good things in the fifty years since.

I guess.

Haven’t heard much of it though.

But I do like “MISS YOU”.

At least gold winning Olympic athletes are allowed to retire at their peak (often around age 27) and allowed to become sales managers or something.

Scientists often do their most creative thinking around age 27 as well, but are allowed to become scientific sages and department and lab heads despite their best days long behind them.

But great artists of all sorts are expected to go on being creative, not just to give us journeyman-level art until they die.

For some, writers of books fictional and truthful, it doesn’t seem a problem being fruitful into their old age : these books often require the wisdom that comes with age.

With visual artists much the same.

Often the same with  dramatic performers, if agism doesn’t restrict them to mostly non-leading roles.

Dancers are often more like athletes : the spirit willing and eager but the body is weak. 

But poets and musicians who gain fame for writing and singing lyrical material with a youthful energy-filled, hopeful naive quality, find it hard to write and sing something new in that mood beyond their forties.

The talented Chuck Berry could no longer write  and sing the popular Chuck Berry  style songs a dozen years after he started while the much less talented Jerry Lee Lewis was singing as well in the 1980s as he had in the 1950s.

Chuck wrote his own stuff and after a while he ran out of things to say and new ways to sing them and play them.

Jerry Lee never wrote his stuff and new songwriters gave him new stuff to sing in new ways.

This was the problem with the Stones, or U2 or REM etc : being a self contained band of composer-performers they found it hard to really do new things despite trying very hard to re-invent themselves.

They didn’t really want to be re-invented and neither did their fans really want that of them.

They became a human jukebox, forced to play all (& only) their old favourites, forever, to the generation that first heard them.

Dying at 27, picked at the peak of perfection, starts sounding not half bad...