Linkin Park: Analyzing the causes of death of Rock band members
I was personally choked to hear about the death of the lead singer of the Linkin Park band. Their music was and still is popular until today.
The news was as choking to me as to anyone else who knew that band. After knowing about the news, I had a discussion about this tragedy , and a question popped up about the fact that rock band members mostly die of suicide or drug over-dose.
I wasn't really sure that this information is true, so I really couldn't have a real argument to say that it is maybe (or not ) the most commun reason of death for Rock stars.
And since I love playing with data, I decided to fact-check the hypothesis stating that:
"The most commun cause of death among rock band members is suicide" .
To start, we have to get some data! and since there is no available data-set to analyse , I had to be creative and scrape this information from the web.
Fortunately I was able to extract about 4000 recorded death cases of Rock band members, with detailed information about them. I will take more time to explain how I did that in a separate article.
Linkin Park Band |
What I am interested in now is the analysis of the causes of death, and verifying if suicide and drug over-dose are the most commun causes of death among rock band members. So I will be doing some exploratory analysis on the data that I had.
But before I talk about the data, I'd like to have an overview of the Rock music world, just to be able to put things into perspective later on.
According to this precious Wikipedia information page , Rock music is a genre of popular music that originated as "rock and roll" in the United States in the early 1950s,
It has almost 400+ different varieties and sub-genres.
The main instruments used in rock music are guitars ,drums and keyboards.
And ever since it emerged, and also nowadays, Rock artists have experimented with many other musical instruments and have included them as a main tool for Rock music, such as violon and saxophones.
And we cannot omit that rock music was always and foremost centered around the vocal contributions of singers and deep engaged lyrics of the songs. Even thou there are different types of Rock music that does not involve philosophical concepts and meaningful lyrics.
AC-DC Live, Rock or Bust tour |
Now let's get to business :
The data has been extracted from the web, I have been lucky to get almost 4000 record of death for rock band members all over the world.
The data is certainly not complete ,nor covers all bands and recorded and unrecorded deaths, But an analysis of this available data-set would give us an overview of the general trend.
The Deaths of Rock band members
- By Country of Origin:
Below the bar-plot show us that the most important number of deaths occurred in the United stated, and this is very normal since the most important number of bands are originated from the US.
Here are the top 10 countries with the highest number of deaths.The USA accounts for 1129 death cases, after that we find Germany, which is a country that has a large number of rock bands, but having 5 times less cases of deaths, with only 206 recorded deaths of rock band members.
- By Role in the Band:
- By Country and Role:
- By Cause of Death:
- Suicide Deaths: