Heavy Metal! It's for smart People!

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Lord Ashtar

I don’t know about that one, but I seem to remember a study that showed that plants in a greenhouse that played metal grew faster and stronger than plants in other greenhouses classical playing in the background. They also had one that played a man talking, another that played a woman talking, and one with near silence.

They did something similar on Mythbusters. The plants that were exposed to death metal did the best.

[pravnik]

@Diogenes the Cynic

This article is no surprise to me. Most every serious metal guitarist I ever jammed with was pretty bright (drummers are a different matter).

Old musician’s joke:
Q: How do you know when the stage is level?
A: The drummer’s drooling out of both sides of his mouth.

[Trunk]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Metal is more oriented towards instrumentation and composition than singing or dancing. A lot of it uses unusual time signatures, more challenging explorations of dissonance and more complex arrangements. It has some of the same qualities as jazz in what it requires from the listener. It requires a more abstract and cerebral sensibility than listening to pop. It aways appealed to me for that reason. Metal heads get tagged with a dumb image, but playing that music actually requires a decent grasp of theory (even if it’s only intuitive). Vocal oriented pop is too simple, too surfacy, too musically shallow to engage me. Pop country is the worst of all. I’d bet that pop country has the dumbest fans of all. It’s the most insubstantial music out there.

Well said. I think that captures a lot of it.

[WarmNPrickly]

I think watching a few episodes of The Osbournes is all that’s needed to disprove the OP’s theory.

Quite to the contrary, it demonstrates quite clearly that heavy metal has a prophylactic effect on the brain. With all the drugs he did, he should be a zombie. Instead, we see a person that occassionally strings as many as four words together in meaningful context.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@ZebraShaSha

If you include AC/DC, then how many teenagers mostly listen to heavy metal? A vast majority.

Are the Kids These Days still listening to AC/DC?

[WordMan]

@Thudlow Boink

Are the Kids These Days still listening to AC/DC?

You’d be surprised. I just showed the 14-year-old kid across the street how to play Problem Child…

Not that AC/DC is really metal, per se - to me, they are hard rock, but for the purposes of this thread and to answer your question, there’s no need to quibble…

I see lots of kids with Hendrix, Zep and other T-shirts.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@WordMan

I see lots of kids with Hendrix, Zep and other T-shirts.

Come to think of it, I see kids with AC/DC shirts too, but that doesn’t necessarily support the OP’s thesis.

[Captain_Socks]

@MrDibble

I think watching a few episodes of The Osbournes is all that’s needed to disprove the OP’s theory.

Yeah, but I’m assuming these are not hard-drinking druggie teenagers.

[Taber]

@lissener

What about that study that showed that rats who listened to classical music ran mazes better than rats who listened to metal?

This study, if accurate, shows that smart people tend to prefer metal.
The rat study, if accurate, shows that metal doesn’t make you smarter.

no contradictions between the two studies.

[Captain_Socks]

@Thudlow Boink

Are the Kids These Days still listening to AC/DC?

Myself, my friend, and, uhhhhh, I’m kind of drawing a blank after that. I’m sure they’re out there, but I cant find them.

[Dung_Beetle]

I know.

[Captain_Socks]

Plus, sometimes it can even get downright intellectual. Iron Maiden will sometimes just put long old poems to music.

[Justin_Bailey]

@mr. jp

Asked for their favourite type of music, 39 percent said rock, 18 percent R&B and 14 percent pop. Six per cent said heavy metal and a third rated it in their top five genres.

The article seems to be slanted towards the heavy metal thing (the author’s probably a metalhead), but the overall numbers look pretty similar to what I think the breakout would be for any random set of 1,000 high schoolers.

So I guess heavy metal fans aren’t smart.

Some are smart, some are average and 50 percent are below average!

I guess most heavy metal fans are pretty stupid huh?

[Captain_Socks]

@Queen Bruin[QUOTE

(OK, so he cut his hair actually just today, does he still have shred cred?)

That depends, does Lars Ulrich still have shred cred?

[Matt_Holck]

is not heavy metal about
a loud driving based
overlaid by a tenor/soprano electro-sustained guitar notes

[Rachael_Rage]

Well, the only band I know to not only actively promote literacy but to have that as the basis of thier entire oeuvre is the extremely heavy metal band BlöödHag. As their best t-shirt says: “The Faster You Go Deaf, the More Time You Have to Read.”

All of their songs are about science fiction authors. During live shows the singer will talk a little about the authors (since you can’t, you know, actually *understand *the lyrics) and they pelt their audiences with paperback books. They get mad if any of the books are thrown back - they’re meant to be taken home and read.

My favorite of their album titles is “Appetite for Deconstruction” but the most recent - “Hell Bent for Letters” - is pretty good too.

[Rachael_Rage]

er…like any good metal head, I know how to spell their.

[Justin_Bailey]

Wow, I just looked on Wikipedia and this Bloodhag is a real band.

I don’t know whether to be frightened or impressed…

[Rachael_Rage]

@Justin_Bailey

Wow, I just looked on Wikipedia and this Bloodhag is a real band.

I don’t know whether to be frightened or impressed…

I’m not nearly smart enough to make up something that good:

BlöödHag plays a public library in Queens, NY

From “Douglas Adams” (Hell Bent for Letters):
*His work is permanently burned into every young nerd’s mind
The real Hitchhiker’s Guide’s being compiled online
*
From “Anne McCaffrey” (Hell Bent for Letters):
Chauvanistic SF was Anne’s complaint
Women did more than scream and faint
Restoree restored reader’s faith: McCaffrey’s magic on display!