Metalheads turned out OK

[Bullgrit]

The thing that struck me the most, (after noting the essentially worthlessness of an online survey of less than 400 people -- "using snowball sampling from Facebook"), was how the different media outlets presented the information.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2015/...0s-metalheads-turned-out-ok/?intcmp=obnetwork

Heavy metal was the No. 1-selling music genre in 1989, and parents feared the worst: that Satan worship, drug use, loads of sex, and suicide went along with it, write researchers in the journal Self and Identity.

Records were burned, "Parental Advisory" warning labels were born, and some '90s research suggested that teens who were into metal had a boatload of problems. And then decades passed.

How did those metalheads turn out? Pretty OK...

Basically: The fears juvenile delinquency were unnecessary.

http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/6620358/metal-1980s-study-metalheads-happy-adjusted

If you spent the '80s skipping class, smoking behind the school dumpsters and listening to Slayer, a new study suggests those were actually good life choices.

Basically: Juvenile delinquency was good.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15298868.2015.1036918#.VZ7D2vlVhBd

Bullgrit

 

[Janx]

Of the Big 4, I never listened to Slayer. I don't think I have ever heard one of the songs even. While I have a nearly complete collection of the others (Metallica, Anthrax and Megadeth).

I also turned out great. I've never done drugs. I've never been arrested or in police custody. I've never even been drunk.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Been drunk, but none of the other. My prodigious music collection features a LOT of metal.

But I was also not a class-skipper or truant in any way. Ah wuz wunna dem GIFTED kidz, so I LIKED goin' t'class.

 

[Janx]

Been drunk, but none of the other. My prodigious music collection features a LOT of metal.

But I was also not a class-skipper or truant in any way. Ah wuz wunna dem GIFTED kidz, so I LIKED goin' t'class.

that's probably part of what the survey results would've hit. Plenty of decent, smart kids liked heavy metal. We just weren't actually bad.

And a good chunk of those heavy metals songs were not about girls or drinking, but about some kind of social change or something. It was the glamrock guys with those kind of songs.

 

[Zak S]

Tipper Gore was wrong but her rhetoric is endlessly recycled even today.

Here's a Bookslut review of her book:
"
She mentions briefly a 1986 study by two Cal State professors who concluded that rock doesn't negatively influence kids, then dismisses it with one sentence: "However, common sense and virtually every other study on the topic suggest otherwise." If you're interested in reading those other studies, good luck -- she doesn't cite any of them. Her only academic source seems to be one Joseph Stuessy, a music professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

And Stuessy's got his own problems. He's able to make huge leaps in logic, never more so than when he discusses rock's alleged equation of sex with violence: "But what if I were an impressionable fifteen-year-old boy today? My rock heroes have told me that sex on a date is expected and that it is a violent act. My penis is a knife, a gun, a rod of steel. Intercourse involves thrusting, plunging, screaming and pain...I don't want my date, who, for all I know, is 'experienced,' to think I'm a wimp! I
will nail her to the bed and make her scream in pain! Boy, this sex stuff is great!!" (extraneous double exclamation point in original).

"