Turn Me On, Dead Man

I recently read This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J Levitin. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend the book. I had thought about trying to write some sort of review of this book, but given that This Is Your Brain On Music was originally published in 2006, it wouldn't exactly be timely. Suffice it to say that if you are at interested in how your brain functions and how your brain processes music, you should read this book.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to take this post in a different direction. Daniel J. Levitin has had an interesting career. He is currently Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, but he got his start in academia relatively late in life, as he dropped out of college to be a musician. He played in bands and worked in a variety of capacities in the music industry. He produced the Blue Oyster Cult album Imaginos, which is an ambitious concept album (I'll leave it to the Wikipedia to describe the concept). All this talk of musical neuroscience and ambitious concept albums got me thinking. The All-Music Guide starts the bio on Blue Oyster Cult with the declaration "Blue Öyster Cult was the thinking man's heavy metal group." The reader could infer a value judgment on the part of about the taste of heavy metal fans, but I'll leave that one alone, and besides, I've seen that phrase used with pride to describe other bands. So I Googled the phrase "thinking man's heavy metal" and references to a number of different bands popped up: Blue Oyster Cult, of course, but also Tool, Queensryche, Rush, Metallica, Helmet, and Megadeth, among others. I did a number of Google searches to determine which band can lay claim to the title of "the thinking man's heavy metal band."

The results of this were not as clear as I had imagined they would be. Of course, my method was pretty crude. All I did was to couple the band's name with the phrase (in quotes) "thinking man's heavy metal" and looked at the number of hits. Comparing the hit counts for the list of bands above was complicated not only by the single- versus multiple-word band names (to use quotes or not to use quotes for the band name?), but also by the use of those superfluous but somehow obligatory umlauts (a practice credited to Blue Oyster Cult). The hit count for "thinking man's heavy metal" and "Blue Öyster Cult" actually yielded more hits (8170) than doing the same search without the umlaut over the O (6800). But in my little test, Blue Öyster Cult came in second to Metallica (12,800 hits). Many of Metallica's hits were related in one way or another to the book Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series) publlished by Wiley, who promote the book as "A provocative study of the ‘thinking man’s’ metal band". But here's an interesting wrinkle, using the abbreviation "BÖC" with the phrase "thinking man's heavy metal" yields the most hits of all (23,700). One cautionary note, however, is that BÖC is used as the abbreviation for Boutique on Columbus, a women's dress shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. That shouldn't change the hits for "thinking man's heavy metal," but who knows?

Given that the phrase "thinking man's heavy metal" is gendered, perhaps justifiably given how the demographics of heavy metal fans are skewed male, I wanted to see what the results would be with the non-gender-specific phrase "thinking person's heavy metal." The results were very interesting. The hit counts for all of the bands were much lower (BÖC registered only 39 hits), with one exception: Helmet can lay claim to the non-gender-specific title of "thinking person's heavy metal" band with 1320 hits.

So there you have it, BÖC (or perhaps Metallica) are the thinking man's heavy metal band, while Helmet is the thinking person's heavy metal band. Could this replace the image of the heavy metal fan presented in Jeff Krulik's classic film Heavy Metal Parking Lot? Currently Heavy Metal Parking Lot is not online (although you can probably find it on YouTube), but a very enjoyable animated version of it is.