On the inherent sexiness of minor keys

That’s fine and all, but that’s nothing special. Rock guitarists have long been avoiding the third with “power chords.” And blues guitarists for even longer.

Almost always, the tonality of a song is implied somewhere in the melody line. It’s awfully difficult to sing a melody and not have the third in there. A noteable exception is blues where the tonality can be ambiguous, at least when analyzing it from a traditional Western music theory perspective.