Hip Hop gets a lot of flack for its problems. It’s definitely profane and has been misogynistic as well as homophobic in the past. Violence also always seems to follow Hip Hop wherever it goes. Hopefully, like society, Hip Hop is maturing and seeing the things it did wrong in the past and looking to not repeat the same mistakes.

In 2017, rapper Logic put out a song called ‘1-800-273-8255,’ which was the hotline to the US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. This is a phone number that many people call when they have suicidal thoughts and don’t have anyone left to talk to. The people on the other end of the line are trained professionals who know how to handle high-risk calls with concern and responsibility.

Logic’s song reached number three on Billboard’s Hot 100 charts and was performed at the 2017 MTV Music Awards as well as the 2018 Grammy Awards. Researchers led by Thomas Niederkrotenthaler at the Medical University of Vienna studied Logic’s song and performances and compared them to daily calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and actual suicide rates in the US.

What they found was astonishing. In the days between the release of the song and the Grammys, there were nearly 10,000 extra calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. This was an increase of seven percent. Over this same period, there were 245 fewer suicides, 5.5 percent less compared to the year before.

While a lot of Hip Hop artists can brag about wanting to be billionaires or taking home some Grammys, only Logic can say that he saved 245 lives.

[From Neuroscience]