I was reading through my RSS feeds today.

For the most part, it was my usual fare – Russia is scary, McCain is old and kind of a dick, Obama is pompous, etc.

But then I saw an article that caught my eye. It’s this one right here, which reports the findings of a study published in a recent Australasian Psychiatry journal. The study found that certain types of behavior could be expected from teens based on their musical tastes.

The article goes on to explain that listening to the music doesn’t cause the behavior, it’s just an indicator that the behavior exists, and that knowing a patient’s musical tastes might offer some clues about them, but then again, it might not, blah, blah, blah.

You all already know all of that, so lets cut the crap and get to the results:

“WHAT STUDIES SAY ABOUT YOUR SOUNDS:

RAP: Higher levels of theft, violence, anger, street gang membership, drug use and misogyny.”

This is bullshit, and let me tell you why. If there’s one thing I know that’s always true all of the time, it’s that one personal example of an exception to a rule completely negates any evidence to the contrary.

You know when you’re talking to someone, and the health hazards of smoking and eating unhealthy come up, and they say something like “My grandfather smoked a pack of cigarettes at every meal for 47 years and washed it all down with a tall, foamy glass of drawn butter and HE lived to be 87″?

Those are the people that GET it. When I say “get it”, I mean “are morons”, but just go with it.

Given that, I think it’s safe to say that this study is a pack of lies. Now sit back and prepare to be wowed as I use isolated incidents and logical fallacys to explain why this study is inaccurate and wrong.

Let’s begin with Jazz and Rhythm&Blues. I have to call bullshit, because I don’t believe that anyone under the age of 20 that listens to Jazz is doing it because they actually like Jazz; I think they’re doing it because they want to impress people, namely girls. These are the same kids that pretend to enjoy reading (and understanding) Kafka and make a point of laughing as visibly as possible at the “jokes” in Shakespearean plays so everyone knows that they appreciate the Bard’s razor-sharp wit (I know that I have to wear adult diapers whenever I go to see King Lear, because whenever I hear the fool say “If a man’s brains were in’s heels, were’t not in danger of kibes?” I am physically unable to keep from crapping in my pants I am laughing so hard.)I’m not saying that Jazz isn’t awesome, or that Kafka isn’t worth reading, or that Shakespeare isn’t funny (Oh wait – yes I am. Shakespeare hasn’t been funny for three hundred years. That’s right, I said it. Am I an idiot? Maybe. Prove me wrong if you disagree.

I’m just kidding. You would need evidence that Shakespeare is still funny to do that, and evidence like that doesn’t exist.) What I am saying is that I don’t believe that teenagers actually love any of those things. They just pretend to in an attempt to get laid.

Dance: I think we can be a little bit more specific than “Higher levels of drug use regardless of socio-economic background.”
Let’s just come out and say it, guys: You’re talking about meth and barebacking (condomless gay sex – the hottest kind). Let’s just call a spade a spade here.

Rap: I don’t know. I don’t think I knew anyone in high school who listened primarily to rap. Ashley? Were you a violent gang member back when you used to ball in the hood? Are you a misogynist?

Pop: I think they may have nailed this one. Maybe teens who listen to pop music ARE overly responsible and have trouble with their sexuality. I certainly notice that I start to feel unsure of my sexuality whenever I listen to pop music.

Unless it’s Justin Timberlake.

When I’m enjoying the hot, hot dance jams that The ‘Lake is throwing down, I have a very strong stance on my sexuality, that stance being “Get Justin Timberlake in here, preferably without his pants on.”

Seriously, though. Look at this picture:

You’re looking at the lead singer of the band Tokio Hotel (Yes, they spell it “Tokio”. If there were any “s”s in their name, you can be sure that they would’ve turned them into “z”s). Tokio Hotel is a pop band that’s extremely popular with 16 year old girls. Unless you really like shitty music, you’ve probably never heard of them.

Now, here’s a question for you, fellas: Would you sleep with the lead singer of Tokio Hotel?

What do you think? Not too bad, right?

I mean, the hair is a little off-putting, but maybe if you were kind of drunk and it was a one night stand, you might be willing to give it a shot, right? Maybe girls who look like that are even kind of your thing.

I know that the first time I saw a picture of the band, my first thought was “That singer doesn’t look too bad!”

There’s just one problem: The name of the person you’re looking at is “Bill”. If you get a wang-o-meter anywhere near him, it’s going to start going off, because that’s totally a dude. Here are a couple more photos:

Doesn’t help, does it?

I swear to god that he’s a guy, but I still always find myself at half mast before my brain has sorted out the conflicting messages between my eyes and my long term memory. On some level I know that I’m looking at a man, but my brain still instinctually starts saying “Ehh, not too bad. I suppose that if I were desperate enough…” for a few milliseconds before the part that stores my memories sends the memo that the person I’m looking at has balls.

So, yeah, I guess the researchers really nailed that one, at least in relation to confusion with sexuality.

Now, I’ll bet that none of you saw this coming, but the genre I still haven’t mentioned really hits a chord with me – Metal.

Let’s review: Higher levels of suicidal ideation, depression, drug use, self-harm, shoplifting, vandalism and unprotected sex?

I have to be honest. I feel cheated.

Almost all of my memories of high school are kind of foggy. I can only recall a handful of random events from those years of my life. Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that I wasn’t idealizing suicide, depressed, using drugs, hurting myself, shoplifting or vandalizing.

Most importantly, however, I can say with 100% certainty that I was not having sex of any kind during high school. In fact, the only sex that I had as a teenager occurred a few months before I turned 20.

That sex was a lot of things – inexperienced, a little bit awkward, the happiest four or five seconds of my life up to that point, but if there’s one thing that it was not, it’s unprotected. Nuclear reactors utilize fewer redundancy systems than my girlfriend and I did. A silverback gorilla couldn’t have made it into her uterus. My seed didn’t stand a chance.

So now, ten years too late, I find out that based on the music I was listening to, I should’ve been a wild, headstrong rebel without a cause, a loose cannon who just didn’t give a fuck. Kind of like Fonzie – Riding my motorcycle over to my pregnant girlfriend’s house with a bunch of AAA batteries I stole from the local drug store stuffed down my pants, wearing a leather jacket and high on cocaine.

That’s basically what the Fonze did, right? I’ve never actually seen an episode of Happy Days.

Do you want to know what I actually did when I was a teenager? I dicked around on computers in my parent’s basement, moped, did just enough to get by academically, wondered what it would be like to touch someone’s boobs and got really, really angry at my parents for making me do wildly unreasonable things, like wash the dishes or put the milk away when I was done using it.

I spent many a night in my room, talking to my poster of Jonathan Taylor Tomas – the one right above my hope chest.

“Oh Jonathan,” I would say, “Take me away from this horrible place!”

But he never did.

He never did.

So, yeah. Metal let me down. Or I let down metal. Or something.

I guess that if I’m going to turn things around, there’s no better time to start than now.

I have to go. I’m going to go smoke cigarettes behind the shed and spend a few hours idealizing suicide. Then maybe I’ll buy a motorcycle and go take a dump in my neighbor’s mailbox. No dice on the unprotected sex, though. I don’t care how metal it is to have babies.

Speaking of things that aren’t metal, enjoy a Tokio Hotel video while I’m gone.