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Drugs do make you a better musician


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Life Expectancy and Cause of Death in Popular Musicians: Is the Popular Musician Lifestyle the Road to Ruin?

"Results showed that popular musicians have shortened life expectancy compared with comparable general populations. Results showed excess mortality from violent deaths (suicide, homicide, accidental death, including vehicular deaths and drug overdoses) and liver disease for each age group studied compared with population mortality patterns. These excess deaths were highest for the under-25-year age group and reduced chronologically thereafter. Overall mortality rates were twice as high compared with the population when averaged over the whole age range. Mortality impacts differed by music genre. In particular, excess suicides and liver-related disease were observed in country, metal, and rock musicians; excess homicides were observed in 6 of the 14 genres, in particular hip hop and rap musicians. For accidental death, actual deaths significantly exceeded expected deaths for country, folk, jazz, metal, pop, punk, and rock."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26966963

 

These are only my opinions, not supported by any actual knowledge, experience, or expertise.
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I can agree with anyone who makes the theoretical assertion "it's better to accomplish X without drugs than with them." I suppose in an ideal world Jimi Hendrix would become the musician he was without ever doing drugs. There's no way to test whether that could have happened. If I look at my playlists, they are full of artists who are either known to have done drugs, or likely did. They all needed something to help them start thinking outside the box. Could they have done the same with buddism, science fiction, badmitton? We'll never know.

 

Bill Hicks said the Beatles were so high, they had to get Ringo off the ceiling with a broom to record a song. "C'mon Ringo, its safe now, you can come down, Yoko's gone!" :D Drugs may unlock a bit of what was still in a larval stage, but they certainly don't PROVIDE creativity. That's on each of us individually. Having lost two friends to narcotics, I have no positive comments on those, period. If you can partake sensibly of milder things with a little forethought, that's called having a life. Its your call. I've had a tiny shot of whiskey before a couple of shows because I felt twitchy and it helped, but otherwise, no. I have too much to remember to go onstage looped! Complex patch changes by hand, from memory, for 60-90 minutes? After two glasses of Chardonnay and a walk through the Hall of Weed getting to the stage? Magic 8-Ball says "Oh Bitch, PLEASE!" :wacko:

 "I want to be an intellectual, but I don't have the brainpower.
  The absent-mindedness, I've got that licked."
        ~ John Cleese

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Hey Sam, I thought the video you posted was funny. Not sure who else watched it. :idk:;)

 

Looks like only you and Greg bothered to check out the video! ha ha ha... Only if they new the original post had nothing to do with drugs! That also makes my post off topic in this thread! To make my post relevant, I gotta confess that I had a beer couple of years ago. Does that count for anything?

 

 

 

 

www.youtube.com/c/InTheMixReviews
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Probably redundant, but what the heck...

 

In the 1970s, in my first band (I was 16 years old, the others were between 23 and 30), the guys all went out to a van during the break between sets and passed a joint around. We all took hits, including underage-little-me. Then we went back into the bar for our last set.

 

I noticed three things:

(1) my fingers responded like someone had stuck a delay line in my nervous system -- I remember saying at the time that it was like playing while embedded in molasses. I knew what was going on, but could not do a damned thing about it.

 

(2) The other guys in the band definitely sucked. Timing, chords, and even lyrics went down the cognitive chute.

 

(3) After the gig, the other guys said "See? I told you we would play better."

 

-Tom Williams

{First Name} {at} AirNetworking {dot} com

PC4-7, PX-5S, AX-Edge, PC361

 

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Life Expectancy and Cause of Death in Popular Musicians: Is the Popular Musician Lifestyle the Road to Ruin?

"Results showed that popular musicians have shortened life expectancy compared with comparable general populations. Results showed excess mortality from violent deaths (suicide, homicide, accidental death, including vehicular deaths and drug overdoses) and liver disease for each age group studied compared with population mortality patterns. These excess deaths were highest for the under-25-year age group and reduced chronologically thereafter. Overall mortality rates were twice as high compared with the population when averaged over the whole age range. Mortality impacts differed by music genre. In particular, excess suicides and liver-related disease were observed in country, metal, and rock musicians; excess homicides were observed in 6 of the 14 genres, in particular hip hop and rap musicians. For accidental death, actual deaths significantly exceeded expected deaths for country, folk, jazz, metal, pop, punk, and rock."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26966963

Awesome. Would love to see the full study. From the abstract, I see a predictor of 'combination of lifestyle pressures and personality.' Statistically, I"m wondering if this implies an interaction (i.e., ANOVA), but also (shifting to multiple regression) what the unique proportion of variance in the criterion (i.e., early death) was attributable to lifestyle pressures, and the unique proportion attributable to personality. Partialling out variance attributable to lifestyle pressures, I"m curious if any specific personality traits among the musician population were found to be predictive of early death. Partialling out variance due to personality, I wonder what the critical lifestyle pressures were. I would not be surprised if a similar combination of personality and lifestyle pressures for other (i.e., non-musician) jobs were predictive of early death. Given the large sample size in this study, it would not take much for there to be a significant interaction, resulting in an opportunity to steer statistically valid results toward the sensational. An examination of effect size statistics would be telling.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

- George Bernard Shaw

 

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You're obviously a statistician, Moonglow. Or at least well-versed. I'm a research consultant in my day job. Yes, effect size is the crux of the matter here.
These are only my opinions, not supported by any actual knowledge, experience, or expertise.
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It was never my thing to do on a regular basis at all, but one night on a Salsa-Cumbia-Merengue gig, one of the percussion players gave me a few bumps of cocaine. We then went on stage and played a 15 minute merengue. And Im talking the real sh*t, Latin audience with many Dominicans at a club in NJ. Mid 1990s. Was probably was one of the best Merengue performances I ever did.

 

This never became a habit, I dont want to promote the usage of cocaine nor do I wish to suggest I performed often on cocaine. But the times I did......Merengue music made sense.

Round these parts we play all three kinds of music! Salsa, Cumbia AND Merengue
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You're obviously a statistician, Moonglow.
Lol. Industrial/organizational psychologist, which can involve a lot of stats. I did my graduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where their claim to fame is quantitative methods. I had the privilege of studying under Dr. Nambury Raju who wrote some of the formulas for meta-analys, utility analysis, item response theory, and validity generalization. I"ve also been teaching undergraduate and graduate statistics courses at a large Midwestern university. Ironically, I'm not very good at math nor do I much care for it (which I always tell my students). Fortunately, statistics generally does not involve a lot of advanced math and I emphasize understanding what an outcome of an analysis means, and how to express that using language/words, than the mechanics of a calculation.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

- George Bernard Shaw

 

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I"ve also been teaching undergraduate and graduate statistics courses at a large Midwestern university. Ironically, I'm not very good at math nor do I much care for it (which I always tell my students). Fortunately, statistics generally does not involve a lot of advanced math and I emphasize understanding what an outcome of an analysis means, and how to express that using language/words, than the mechanics of a calculation.
I'm not good at math either. I never had calculus or trig, didn't do well in algebra or geometry. But I get statistics intuitively. It's a different kind of thing than advanced math. People who don't know anything about statistics don't get this; they assume statistics is some kind of complicated math. The math is not that hard and software does all the calculations anyway. It's more about analysis and interpretation of results and applying the appropriate tests.

 

These are only my opinions, not supported by any actual knowledge, experience, or expertise.
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Zero consumption of anything other than food and water during a gig. However, when I get home it's nice to unwind. One of the bands I'm in do a few boutique beers during the gig, and it's quite moderate.

 

As far as enhancing creativity, I've found lots of better results by doing simple things like sleeping well, eating well, exercising, etc.

 

Although back in the hairy day I was in a band that dosed together regularly. Big mind-bending musical circus. Listen to Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" from the LIve/Dead album to get a sense of what we were trying to do at the time.

 

Definitely in the rear view mirror :)

Want to make your band better?  Check out "A Guide To Starting (Or Improving!) Your Own Local Band"

 

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