America’s Workforce: Horrified

So, the other day, Repulsion’s bassist/vocalist/friend of Decibel, Scott Carlson sent us a link to a rather peculiar little article from the Washington Post with the comment attached, “Our music is truly Repulsive.”
Check it out: Is Listening to Music Making You Worse at Your Job?

Now, why out of all the bands that have existed in the history of grindcore and/or death metal, the researchers zeroed in on Repulsion is beyond us, but when you take a look at a link from the British Psychological Society’s blog site giving a bit more background into the study, you can see the psychologists did their share of research not only into Repulsion, but just why the average (wo)man on the street might literally lose their shit upon hearing the songs the Mudrian family is probably using to lull their daughter to sleep at this very moment. As someone who, during a more promising time in my life, was working on a Ph.D. in the Psychology of Music and wasted a good chunk of my early adult-hood doing stuffy lab experiments that ultimately sucked every inch of fun out of listening to and experiencing music, I can always appreciate an unintentionally hilarious clinical assessment of the music we hold so dear to our blackened hearts. Which is why I loved this line taken from the BPS blog:

The fast-tempo ‘extreme guitar-based’ music of Repulsion, the researchers explained, is like ‘a cacophony of sound, in which the segmentation of each individual sound from the next is difficult to identify.’ This means it has less acoustic variation from one moment to the next, which helps explain why, even though disliked, it had a less detrimental effect on serial recall than Infernal’s [the band used as an example of music the study’s subjects enjoyed] pop song.”

And you gotta love the writer’s assumption that Korn is so universally loathed that they would help improve cubicle performance everywhere.