Tupac Shakur’s death has long been a debate: was it a random drive-by shooting, gang-related, or part of the East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry? That’s what Dianna Theadora Kenny, a professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney wants to find out. In the meantime though, she has come across some startling facts.

Kenny looked into the deaths of 13 000 pop musicians and how they died.

Among Kenny’s shocking findings: More than 50 percent of hip-hop musicians in her sample were murdered.

Interesting…

She had a look at all genres of music and came up with these results:

Murder accounted for 6.0% of deaths across the sample, but was the cause of 51% of deaths in rap musicians and 51.5% of deaths for hip hop musicians, to date. This could be due to these genres’ strong associations with drug-related crime and gang culture.

HERE‘s a list of “murdered rappers” from Wikipedia, and HERE‘s the top ten list of murdered rappers from AskMen, just FYI.

Kenny also found out the following:

Metal and punk musicians were most at risk of accidental death
Folk and jazz musicians were more likely to die from cancer
Blues musicians were more likely to die from heart-related causes
Gospel musicians had the lowest suicide rates — “perhaps protected by their religious beliefs”
19% of deceased metal musicians killed themselves
11% of of deceased punks killed themselves

Best you go into jazz or country music then…

[Source: The Washington Post]