Heavy Mental

Look, Loki, we’re going to be talking science here. Not “The Science,” like people who are gulled by articles in regular newspapers. I mean honest to goodness science. Hard evidence. Statistics. Here it comes, so to speak: Heavy Metal is for wankers.

Let’s plow right into the data. Wander on over to Psypost.org, and peruse Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success. It’s just a summary of a hardcore paper over at the American Psychological Association, but it’ll save you from having to read one of those pdfs with scatter plots and bar charts and control group flim flam and other assorted massage techniques for statistics. The “Impact Statement” over at the source material is a hoot, though, and drives right to the basket, as it were:

This study explores the idea that heterosexual male metal guitarists are motivated to invest heavily in getting good at guitar to primarily impress other men. The study’s results provide some support for this idea. Additionally, metal guitarists also seem to be somewhat motivated by a desire for casual sex. (link)

Please note that they’re motivated by a desire for casual sex. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna get any. As my friend Shaky Bill might say, it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance, due to a performance that features shredding. Heavy metal guitarists are mostly in store for the most casual kind of sex, the kind with no one else present. It’s science!

This is very old news to anyone who’s actually worked in the regular cover band music business. Once, on a lark, I tried to explain to people why playing guitar hero songs like Sultans of Swing was a bad idea if you wanted a female human still  present when you finished up. I had a hard time making myself understood. That isn’t even in the neighborhood of Heavy Metal, but the phenomenon is exactly the same. I’ve gone over this ground before:

Sultans of Swing is just Freebird for people who’d rather watch My Dinner with Andre instead of NASCAR on TV

“Making myself understood” with people reading on the internet, I mean. We had plenty of luck making ouselves understood back in the day. We played in bands that performed covers of stuff like the following instead of Sultans of Swing. Believe you me, girls understood exactly what we were after:

Now, I’m not claiming you could get Helen Reddy to panty drop just by playing Funky Music. You’d probably have to play Funky Music and get two or three Sloe Gin Fizzes in her, too. But covering a Black Sabbath number is definitely not going to get you home without duct tape, rope, and rohypnol. God, we all knew that back in the day. Did you really think we played disco because we liked it?

There’s no joke so wild that you can make these days that events won’t overtake it. For example, Spinal Tap was a great parody of the genre. Here’s the script:

MARTY: Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience
seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.
D AVID: Well it’s a sexual thing, really isn’t it? Aside from the identifying the boys do with us there’s also a re-reaction
to the female…..of the female to our music. How did you put it?
NIGEL: Really they’re quite fearful—that’s my theory. They see us on stage with tight trousers. We’ve got, you know,
armadillos in our trousers. I mean it’s really quite frightening…
DAVID: Yeah.
NIGEL: …the size…and and they, they run screaming

And here we are, back to THE SCIENCE:

Although there is evidence that playing music increases male attractiveness, the sexual selection explanation may not be mutually exclusive to all types of music. Extreme metal is a genre that is heavily male-biased, not only among the individuals that play this style of music, but also among the fans of the genre.

Do tell. Of course being scienticians or psychomechanics or whatever the capital letters after their names mean, they get the right data and then bollix up the conclusions:

Therefore, it is unlikely that extreme metal musicians are primarily trying to increase their mating success through their music.

There’s wrong, and then there’s the wrong like that sentence. You need a map to travel far enough out into the wrongness to deal with that begged question. The stats and your humble narrator says playing metal guitar doesn’t help you one whit with the ladies, and may actually hurt your chances. Good so far. But they extrapolate that the men who endlessly practice two finger barre chords with the fuzz box on eleven must be doing it for some other reason than getting chicks, because they can’t get any.  Says who? Assuming that rational people would discover that metal music checks exactly zero female boxes, which would lead to self-awareness and a change to performing Marvin Gaye covers, has nothing to do with metal players. They’re simply failing, over and over, and never figuring out why.

I’ll give you a much more trenchant example of the phenomenon. I double dog dare you to find any metal band, anywhere, at any time, getting over better with a room full of hot babes than this dude:

You just know what that guy is swimming in, and it ain’t due to Blue Oyster Cult covers.

But there’s one more data point I can let you all in on. In a way, it’s borderline anecdotal, but I gotsa lotta anecdotes at my disposal. Here goes: It doesn’t matter what kind of guitar genre you learn. She always goes home with the bass player anyway. Deal wif it.