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You are what you listen to
Heavy metal listeners have a loose sense of hair hygiene. Musicals are for girls. Indie music fans smoke pot. Everybody just knows that, right? Now, psychologist Adrian North from Leicester University has backed up the clichés for you. He found clear-cut correlations between musical tastes and “lifestyle preferences.”
In his study of 2500 Britons, 29% of DJ-based music lovers declared five or more sexual partners in the last five years. A mere 0.9% of 1960s pop devotees answered likewise. Three quarters of musical theater lovers were female. And nearly 6 out of 10 Indie aficionados admitted to having tried cannabis, compared to just 28% of disco enthusiasts.
No big surprise there, though a few of the findings were downright funny. “The wealthy, wine-drinking, opera lovers were the fourth biggest magic mushroom poppers of our sample,” muses North.
A “very, very bad guitarist” in his teenage years, North has been debugging musical stereotypes throughout more than 10 years of research. In this study he simply asked questions such as: what music do you listen to? How much do you earn? What is your love life like? What do you drink? Oh, and how many times a week do you wash thy hair? Then he looked for a pattern.
Two neat musical clusters emerged along a predictable liberal/conservative line. But digging deeper into beliefs and behaviors brought about intriguing inconsistencies. “The R&B, hip-hop, dance and house buffs tend to vote Labour (the UK’s governing left of center party).Yet in the following questions, they come out as the strongest opponents to tax raises for improving public services, or to state-funded health care,” explains North. Is this disbelief, disinterest, or plain contradiction? “R&B and rap fans could be better described as libertarians than liberals: they believe in liberal values as long as nobody tells them what to do,” says North.
The bottom line question remains. What’s cause, what’s effect? Are law-abiding introverts natural-born ‘My Fair Lady’ lovers, or could a steady exposure to Broadway melodies turn you into a model citizen? On a more deleterious note, could listening to, say, heavy metal make you a greasy-haired, promiscuous drug-addict? Could porn create rapists? Can gory movies unleash latent serial killers?
North has nothing other than correlations to chew on and is wary of such causal interpretations. “Everyone seems to have their own pet theory about who likes what music,” he explains, “but there has been very little academic research so far.” The few existing studies before his were limited to small American samples, dating back to times when Beyoncé wasn’t even born.
Now, North has set up a worldwide web survey asking for a larger number of factors like sex, age, personality traits to compare with a daunting number of mysterious musical styles - from afrobeat to klezmer, through to zorba, juju or qawwali. Some 35,000 respondents filled in his questionnaire already; go help him and fill in yours on www.musicaltastetest.com.
