Linkin Park: Analyzing the causes of death of Rock band members
Being a part of the Y generation, I grew up listening to various types and genres of music, from Rap to RnB, to Rock and electronic music.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
We all might think that the Drummers are the angriest of all Rock band members, that they like to hit stuff since they are always with sticks beating downs the drums for rythme.
But the below bar-plot proves that Guitarist are the ones who are most likely to die, with 1007 death cases, followed by Vocalist with 784 cases.
According to this graph, the safest role in a rock band is the Keyboard player, with only 80 recorded deaths (again, this is always according to the available data I managed to scrape off the web)
- By Country and Role:
Here we mix up tow information, the country of origin and the role in the band. You can see that the Guitarist are most likely to die if the are from the USA. Guitarist are always more likely to die in all the countries.
- By Cause of Death:
Now, we come to the most interesting part of this project, what are the most commun causes of death among rock band members?
As you can see in the 2 graphs below, health problems is the #1 cause of death. followed by accidents.
Suicide and Overdoses are in the third and fifth place as the most commun death reasons.
As you can see, Health issues are the number one cause of death, with 984 recorded deaths. suicide is only accountable for 358 cases, and drug-alcohol overdose have 102 cases.
Murder is the fourth most commun death reason with 110 cases. rock band members have been recorded to be victimes of various murder and homicide cases in the past years.
Various types of accidents were recorded, car crashes, motorcycle crashes and even helicopter crashes ! ( RIP to Dmitriy Donskoy, a Drummers from the band "Deathonator" from,Russia).
So as you can see, health problems and accidents account for more than half of the death causes for rock band members.
It is safe to say that rock band members might not be the most athletic or health-conscious people on earth, but while analyzing the data, many of the health issues included illnesses that could have been treated and prevented .
Below a list of the detailed causes of death.
- Suicide Deaths:
So lets see what are the types or suicide used by rock band members. As you can see in the below table, there are 271 cases where the type of suicide or the tools used are not specified. But the most commun way is by hanging.
Conclusion
After this curiosity-driven project, I can now say that suicide and overdoses are NOT the most commun cause of death of rock band members.
The misconceptions people have are always related to the nature of thing they are thinking about.
A natural death is not as choking as a suicide case, and it does not make people talk about it in a very tragic way.
I hope you find this work interesting, and please get in touch and give me your comments!
This little work has been both fun, and sad for me. It is hard to go through all these rockers and musicians, to know how they died and to listen to their music and feel sorry for their death.
I will leave you with this music video from Linkin Park... RIP Chester
