Dianna Theadora Kenny, Professor of Psychology and Music at the University of Sydney, has some very unflattering words for all you metal musicians out there- you're gonna die quicker than most other musicians in any other genre. According to the study, Kenny says metal musicians live to about 35 years old as females and about 38 years old as males. In the study, she does admit that metal is a much younger genre than, say blues or jazz, so the numbers might be a little bit lower because there are less musicians to gauge from. Observe the above chart, and the more detailed breakdown below…
I would imagine "accidental" includes misadventure and drug overdoses, and suicide also makes sense because black metal is a thing. She went into more detail in the her study about what it means:
“For male musicians across all genres, accidental death (including all vehicular incidents and accidental overdose) accounted for almost 20% of all deaths. But accidental death for rock musicians was higher than this (24.4%) and for metal musicians higher still (36.2%).
“Suicide accounted for almost 7% of all deaths in the total sample. However, for punk musicians, suicide accounted for 11% of deaths; for metal musicians, a staggering 19.3%. At just 0.9%, gospel musicians had the lowest suicide rate of all the genres studied.”
The cancer bit kind of threw me off a little bit though. You can directly overdose on drugs or kill yourself, or even cause a heat attack by being really unhealthy, but cancer? That seems like it's more a hereditary thing. That seems more like it would be a "by total chance" kind of number rather than it being a factually accurate number based on the lifestyles of metal musicians.
The bright side? None of you rap.
[via MetalSucks]
