Last week LA Weekly used an article on “identity, music and sexual attraction” from the journal Psychology of Music as a jumping off point for a round-up of various congruous research under the header “Can Bad Taste in Music Ruin a Relationship?” The material is mostly pretty thin gruel. (Not to mention manifestly debunked by our Justify Your Shitty Taste feature…) “The kid who wants to appear rebellious picks music that seems like it’s made by people who rebel. The kid who wants to belong picks music that appears to be made by people who are accepted” is not exactly an earth-shattering insight, especially if you’ve already figured out that alternating Anthrax and Megadeth all-over-print T-shirts throughout most of sophomore year probably contributed to you spending semi-formal night watching Police Academy sequels. What’s more interesting is the following nugget which suggests it needn’t have been so — that we coulda been Carey Mahoneys in corpsepaint:
[A] woman’s devotion to country music diminishes her attractiveness to a potential (male) mate; so too does a man’s interest in country music make him less attractive to women. But (!) devotion to classical music and to heavy metal rock has a different effect depending on if you’re a (heterosexual) man or a (heterosexual) woman. The study says, “Fascination with heavy metal rock greatly enhanced the appeal of men, but it proved detrimental to that of women.” And the reverse is true of classical music: guys dig girls who are into classical music, but not the reverse.
Following this to its logical conclusion I suppose we can extrapolate that symphonic black metallers have no idea what huge latent playas exist within themselves, Hank Williams III fans suffer from subconscious asexuality, the boys pining after the female heavy metal keyboardists certain other metal magazines work so desperately to turn into pin-up girls are wasting their time, and, perhaps most importantly, if we can just weather the storm Toby Keith love should go the way of the dodo.
Then again, as a counterpoint, I think it’s safe to assume these Poindexters have never met our own uber-appealing Jeanne Fury or examined the classic Revenge of the Nerds scene posted above.
Those caveats aside, however, should these vaunted pheromonic powers turn out to have some provable basis, metal heads would be wise not to exploit them. After all, as the esteemed philosopher Toby Maguire once posited, With great power comes great responsibility, and, anyway, do you really want to end up having to resort to the degradations Vince Neil cops to in a chapter entitled “Egg Burritos” from his recent Tattoos & Tequila? (after the jump):
Mike Sager: Is that a true story?
Vince Neil: Absolutely. It was when we’d just had sex with girls in the studio and we didn’t want to go home smelling like them. There was a restaurant, called Naugles, it was open twenty-four hours. And we would order egg buritos amd wipe our dicks with them. Then if you went home smelling like an egg burrito, you just told your girlfriend, “Oh, I dropped my egg burrito in my lap.”
Mike: So did you actually open the burrito and insert? Or did you just, like, use it as a washcloth?
Vince: Used it kind of like a washcloth.
I think we’d better add a palate cleanser here. Take it away, King Diamond…