Is Your Musical Taste Smart or Dumb? Science Decides.

All the smart kids listen to the Counting Crows, but all the fools listen to T.I. Does that make any sense?  Well, according to science, it is true (“Long December” is, of course, our “The Waste Land” – “It’s all a lot of oysters/but no pearls” = VMA Prize for Poetry).  This “study” isn’t new exactly, but I was reminded of it earlier today.  To conduct it, some internet fellow compared the “favorite music” listings on Facebook from students at around 1,300 different colleges and plotted the popularity of the musicians against the average SAT scores of the colleges.

The top three musical choices for high-scoring try-hards are Beethoven, Sufjan Stevens, and the Counting Crows.  The musicians most popular among the dumb set are…  

Lil Wayne, T.I., and Beyonce.

So there may be a few problems with this guy’s methodology.  But the biggest one is, why did he feel the need to plot out so many mid-’90s alt-rock groups?  ”The results are showing that Yellowcard is more intelligent than 311?  THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING.”  Also, the survey includes virtually no female artists (Norah Jones is the smartest.  Ehhh.  Who among us, smart or dumb, wouldn’t take “Where Da Cash At?” over that snooze music any day of the week?).  One writer asks,

Why does beat-driven stuff end up mostly on one side of the ledger and lyric-driven stuff mostly on the other?

How about because when I’m trying to get my grind on, I don’t want some stupid music trying to say words at me?  You can’t just play words up in the club, hello.  Do you want to go out on the dancefloor and dance to a book?  Is that what you want?

See it bigger at Music That Makes You Dumb.