Music For Stupid People

Last week, Ryan offered me a bit of news from about this time last year that has led me to discover the efforts of one Virgil Griffith. His website, by the way, is at http://virgil.gr/. If he happens to stumble upon this blog entry, all I can say is, I feel your pain. Best of luck with grad school, my brother in arms. Anyway, he wrote a bit of software that tracks the sources of Wikipedia edits. His little experiment revealed that many major companies had edited their own Wikipedia pages. Companies such as Exxon-Mobil, Pepsi, and Diebold all made edits to their pages that removed undesirable information from being displayed.

Originally, I was planning on doing a long commentary on the state of quality control on Wikipedia. I was even going to cite the recent incident wherein my friend, an undergraduate engineer, found an error in a section on vortex tubes and tried to rectify it. But as everyone knows, I'm easily distracted.

On Mr. Griffith's site, he has a feature entitled Music That Makes You Dumb. By scanning Facebook for numerous schools and their listed Top 10 music interests, he was able to list the top 133 musical interests on Facebook and their associated average SAT scores. The results are pretty interesting.

As I would have guessed, the lowest SAT scores are associated with Rap or R&B artists - Lil Wayne and Beyonce, for example. However, it's not necessarily a racial divide, as a range of "Emo" artists such as The Used and My Chemical Romance are close behind.* There were also your standard expectations at the higher end of the SAT spectrum, with bands such as Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, and really all of the "Indie" genre, which did the best in terms of scores. What I loved to see, though, was that there was only one Classical composer to make the list - none other than my main man, Beethoven. He actually blows everyone else out of the water, with 120 points over the second-place Mr. Stevens. I'm popping in my copy of the 9th Symphony as I type.

Another interesting project to note from Mr. Virgil's site is essentially the same thing using favorite books instead of favorite music. In that case, Erotica and African-American literature rank on the lower ends of the spectrum - followed, of course, by religious books. The highest-ranking genre comprises Classics (topped, oddly enough, by Lolita), followed by Philosophy and Science Fiction (one of the highest-ranking books in that genre being Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle).

Of course, for me, that's just an interesting aside. Anyone who knows me knows that I care much more about the results of the music study. If I ever have kids - and I'll try not to for the sake of humanity, but you never know - I will be sure to point them to this study if they start to listen to Rap music. Of course, that assumes that Rap will still be popular at that point in the future. God forbid "Emo" - a much more depraved and mindless genre as of late - surpasses it in popularity. Whatever genre it happens to be, I refuse to pass on the myth that masturbation will make you blind. Far more important to me is the belief - however baseless - that listening shitty music will make you stupid. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go get a stronger prescription for my eyeglasses.

* - I'm using quotes here, because I've long been against the use of the "Emo" label to describe whatever you'd call this music. True Emo was an evolution of the Hardcore scene of the 1980's Washington, D.C. area. It sounds nothing like what these bands today are putting out. The so-called Emo music of today is really an overly-dark version of the Bubblegum Pop paradigm. I therefore dub it "Licorice Pop." If this phrase gets used by music journalists, just remember you read it here first.