Music=Baseball?

Hey guys,

Matt here. It’s certainly been a while, hasn’t it? ­I have to admit, last month I committed THMP infidelity with my LOST guest blog over at Pop Candy, and just last week I wrote my first post for the all new Boston @ New York blog created by Plushgun’s Dan Ingala. But Alex’s triumphant return to THMP has inspired me to finish a little project I’ve been working on for a while, so here we go!

Sabermetric nerds like me (baseball stat-lovers) will be familiar with the concept of a player’s “peak years.” Although there is some debate as to what the exact peak age is, baseball players tend to have their most productive season between the ages of 26 and 31. Before that they’re still coming into their own, and once the hit their 30’s their skill set begins to decline. Age 27 is often considered a make-or-break time for ballplayers – if they don’t have their “breakout” season by then, it’s probably never gonna happen.

That got me thinking, is the same true for musicians? Do we have “peak” and “breakout” years, and are they the same as in baseball? The answer, for the most part, was a resounding “yes.”

Now, the first thing I had to decide was how to determine a band’s age. And I’ll admit, I took the easy way and just assigned the lead singer’s age to the whole band. I know, I know, it’s not perfect but there was still a lot of work ahead.

I found that, just as in baseball, before modern advances in nutrition and conditioning (steroids and botox?), musicians used to peak earlier than they do now. Consider The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who. If you consider their 5 “peak years” to start at age 24 or 25, you get the following albums: Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The White Album, Abbey Road, Let It Be, Their Satanic Majesties Request, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile On Main Street, Tommy, Who’s Next, and Quadrophenia, among others. Not a bad list! With Led Zeppelin you have to start even younger, when Robert Plant was just 21, but you still get a five year peak that includes Led Zeppelin 1-4 and House of the Holy.

Skipping along to the beginning of the “modern era,” we can use the standard ages 26-31 as our “peak seasons” and the baseball/music parallels become uncanny. U2 and REM came out with The Joshua Tree, Achtung Baby, Green, Out Of Time and Automatic For The People during those years (1986-1991).

The grunge/alternative scene fits in pretty well, with Pearl Jam (Ten, Vs., Vitalogy), Soundgarden (Badmotorfinger, Superunknown), Smashing Pumpkins (Siamese Dream, Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness), Radiohead (The Bends, OK Computer), Nine Inch Nails (The Downward Spiral), and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magic) all putting out their best work during their age 26-31 years. Other 90’s acts like Dave Matthews Band (Under The Table and Dreaming, Crash, Before These Crowded Streets) and Beck (Odelay, Mutations, Midnight Vultures) fell into the same pattern. Hip hop artists like Dr. Dre (The Chronic), Jay-Z (Reasonable Doubt, In My Lifetime volumes 1-3) and Outkast (Speakerboxxx/The Love Below) also peaked from ages 26-31.

In all my research I found two notable exceptions: bands that had double peaks. First we have Aerosmith, who from the ages of 25-30 put out the albums Aerosmith, Get Your Wings, Toys In The Attic, Rocks, and Draw The Line, then disappeared for close to ten years and came back with a vengeance, at age 39, with Permanent Vacation, Pump and Get A Grip. It’s hard to say which phase was more successful. And we have the strange case of Green Day, who burst onto the scene at age 22 with Dookie, Insomniac and Nimrod, then spent their “peak” ages of 26-31 putting out the lone dud Warning, before returning at age 32 with their most successful album to date, American Idiot.

It’s also of course worth mentioning that the age of 27 has a special meaning in rock music, because it’s the age where everyone dies. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and countless others, have had their careers (and lives) cut short at just 27 years old. It’s impossible to say what the next four years would’ve held for these artists, but if their peers are any indication, they could’ve been just at the beginning of their greatest creative period.

So where does that leave us? Chris Martin from Coldplay turned 31 last year, but Kings of Leon and MGMT are just beginning their 26-31 years, and hopefully they’ll follow the trends of their predecessors…