Lollapalooza is here, and fully ready to rock you right in your damn face if you so choose. But maybe this year you should think about skipping it, sitting down with some knitting, and having a nice cup of tea instead. See, music has been proven to have serious physical effects on the human body - both highly positive and absurdly negative - and if you don’t watch what you listen to, there are a few ways you could quite literally be rocked to death.
Neurological Dangers
Neurobiologists Harvey Bird and Gervasia Schreckenberg ran an exhaustive study on what effects constant exposure to rock and roll has on laboratory mice, and found some highly abnormal growth patterns in the hippocampus: An absurd amount of neural connections were being made…to nothing. This caused poorer overall performance in routine tasks, disorientation, and frequent confusion. Listening to hard rock turned once valuable brain cells into shiftless, purposeless entities - uncertain, irritable, and unable to make meaningful connections to one another – in other words, teenagers. Yeah, that’s right: Science just solved teenage angst.
You’re welcome, High School Woodshop Class.
So why do we continue to indulge in this damaging behavior? Well, fast tempo music can induce higher levels of cortisol – a stress hormone similar to adrenaline – which can be very addicting in its own right. I’m not saying that by listening to crappy pseudo-rock too often, you’re going to end up sucking cock for Sum 41 tickets or freebasing H.I.M. CD’s in the back room of a filthy whore squat. I’m just heavily implying it.
Oh, and one more tiny, almost not worth mentioning thing: When the mice were exposed to frequent, steady, rapid percussion – the backbone of modern hip-hop – they became “hyperactive and aggressive, often engaging in cannibalistic behavior.” I don’t want to draw any hasty conclusions, or dramatize some overhyped study in order to condemn a whole genre of some of the most innovative music of modern times - I’m just saying: Rap makes you eat people.
Church.
Impending Conflict
Musical choice often dictates external appearance and outward behavior. Because people identify so strongly with their music, and because all musical choice is subjective, these differences can often lead to conflict. And every once in a while that conflict escalates so far beyond all reasonable levels that it gathers international attention. For the most recent example of this, consider the Mexican Anti-Emo Riots that recently raged across that country. Literally hundreds of people began physically attacking small groups of Emo kids – attacks that eventually ended with “the bloody victims sobbing on the concrete.” The difference between this and any other night being that the Emo kids were left bloody and on the concrete, instead of just emotionally drained and in the back of their mother’s minivan.
But Mexico is not the only one inexplicably picking on a group notorious for its emotional fragility. Russia is actually one-upping the Anti-Emo riots by straight up outlawing Emo-kids across the country. Russian legislators cite the clique’s tendency towards depression and suicide as the primary reasons for banning, but if I have to forward a guess I’d say it’s far more likely that lawmakers in Russia – a place infamous for overcompensating macho men - just fear a country-wide outbreak of week-kneed pansy syndrome, this is just a preemptive pussy quarantine.
Psychological Warfare
Music can greatly affect your emotional state: That’s why there are musical themes to accompany most major life events, as in weddings, birthdays and funerals. Now, if only there was some way to exploit this emotional context for evil….
Don’t worry; the US Military is on it!
In November of 2004, just before the siege of Fallujah by US Military forces, the 361st PsyOps Company was responsible for “preparing the battlefield.” They did this by blasting songs like Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” into the city using Long Range Acoustic Devices. The music reportedly “acted like a psychological smoke bomb,” which disoriented and addled enemy forces before the siege. An unforeseen side effect of this: Upon invasion, all insurgents were found wearing sleeveless denim vests, drunk on Coors Light and passed out in the passenger sides of some broken-down 1986 Pontiac Firebirds.
The US Military also regularly uses music as an interrogation technique. There have been documented reports of US forces placing headphones set at maximum volume on detainees, playing songs like Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” among others. Many bands are protesting this use of their music as a weapon, and it has become something of a controversial issue among the artists. NPR Reporter Terry Gross reached James Hetfield, lead singer of Metallica, for comment about the prevalent use of his music to degrade and harm his fellow man. Hetfield responded that he was "proud" that his music was considered "culturally offensive" to the Arabic peoples. He goes on to say that his music is all about “freedom to express my insanity.... If they're not used to freedom, I'm glad to be a part of the exposure." At which point I can only assume he mounted his giant dickhead shaped rocket and douched away into the sky - his powers of dickotry wasted on only one measly little planet.
But that's alright, because if there's one thing I've learned from all of this, it's that Metallica is most frequently used for torture. When your band sucks so hard that it is biologically damaging to the native lifeforms, it's safe to say that your work here is done.
