I remember the Pastor. He used to tell us the craziest stuff in church. He said that if we didn’t get into the highest kingdom of Heaven, we’d be resurrected without genitalia. He told us that at some point Satan would be given control of all the water on Earth, and anyone in the water at that precise instant would be pulled under and drowned. He told us that Jesus would ‘probably’ come again in 1986. (Well, at least that one was falsifiable.) And we just slurped it all up because he was so entertaining and he read so many church books.
The other one he told us was that when we played records, there was a certain ‘spirit’ who was assigned to that particular record, and the spirit could ‘come into the room’ when that record was played. How does that work?
Interviewer: So you’re the spirit assigned to the new Britney Spears record.
Spirit: Yeah, that’s right.
Interviewer: The whole record?
Spirit: Nah, guv, just the single.
Interviewer: What were you doing for eons of time before the release of the Spears disc?
Spirit: Well, you know, causing disease and insanity, infesting herds of swine — can’t be bad — and I was also assigned to the original ‘Hotel California’ vinyl release. Which still gets a lot of play, so it keeps me busy, you know!
Interviewer: So how does the infiltration work?
Spirit: Well, when they play the record, I have permission to enter the room and tempt, entice, and ensnare without let or hindrance. Great stuff.
Interviewer: Did you have trouble with the move to CD’s?
Spirit: There was some legal stuff to do with multi-format, but it all got sorted out in the end. Piece of cake, mate.
So you can understand how I was getting Pastor flashbacks when I saw this article: Raunchy music influences teens’ sexual habits
TEENAGERS whose music players are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study has found.
‘Raunchy’ sounds kind of loaded. I thought I’d get it from the source, so I found this month’s copy of Pediatrics. They don’t use the term ‘raunchy’. Instead they settled on ‘degrading’. That’s a lot less opinionated.
I wondered who was behind this study, and it turned out to be some people from the Rand Corporation.
The RAND Corporation is a global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. The organization has since expanded to working with other governments and commercial organizations.
Notable RAND participants:
Lewis “Scooter” Libby, V.P. Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff
Donald Rumsfeld — Chairman of RAND Corporation from 1981-1986 and current Secretary of Defense for the United States (as of May 2006)
Condoleezza Rice — former trustee 1991-1997 and current Secretary of State for the United States (as of May 2006), former intern
Francis Fukuyama — academic and author of The End of History and the Last Man
Could you hang on a minute? That was my warning signal going off again. Sorry. Have to get it checked.
The devil’s in the definitions on these things. How did they tell ‘degrading’ sexual lyrics from ‘non-degrading’ sexual lyrics?
Two raters independently coded the lyrics, obtained from Internet Web sites, of all songs (n = 193) from each of the 16 albums. The unit of analysis was the song. Raters first judged whether a song contained 1 or more references to sexual behavior (implicit or explicit references to intercourse, oral sex, or other sexual acts). For each song deemed to contain more than 1 sexual reference, raters then judged whether the song contained only nondegrading references to sex or contained more than 1 degrading sexual reference.
Two raters, eh? How well did they agree?
To establish interrater reliability for classifying the type of content in a song, raters double-coded one third (n = 63) of all of the songs. These songs were selected via stratified random sampling, with artists as strata. Inter-rater reliability was satisfactory (Cohen’s kappa ranged from 0.74 to 0.92).
I dunno, that kappa seems a little low for a two-class categorisation, especially when they didn’t even bother to check all the songs.
And what kinds of songs turn out to be ‘degrading’? Check the table. 
What a surprise. Rap and R&B. Everything else is perfectly fine and non-degrading.
Oops, there goes the signal again. It’s been so sensitive lately.
Could it be that the coders just didn’t like that kind of music? And that sexual activity correlates with other factors, both socio-economic and educational, as shown by their own data? And it may be more helpful to address these trends instead of printing stickers that say “Listening to Ja Rule will get you pregnant.”
Pardon me for saying, but phony, biased, politically-motivated research pisses me off, and I think this one’s at least two out of three.
9 August 2006 at 9:31 pm
Not a scientist but I’m also not sure about the conclusion:
TEENAGERS whose music players are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study has found.
How are they checking that this can’t be flipped to:
Teenagers who are sexualy active are more likely to listen to “raunchy” music.
Ya know the whole cause and effect thing?
10 August 2006 at 2:57 pm
The tone of this post seemed rather strange to me at the beginning but then it got really interesting.
I wasn’t surprised so much by the fact that SOME research is politically motivated – I know somthing about the different types of interests involved in a specific field of study. What I found alarming was the fact that some people are trying to control other people’s private lives and they do it in the dark. Nothing new. Still, not something that one is constantly aware of.
10 August 2006 at 7:55 pm
PS – The title of the post. HAHA.
11 August 2006 at 3:15 pm
I also enjoy Daniel’s witty titles. (The posts on my blog usually have no title as it just takes me too long to think of something to write)
11 August 2006 at 3:25 pm
I listened to musical theatre and well… 🙂
I’m not going to debate anything posted here, however I wanted to add that I think that music is a powerful thing which holds a certain mystical element for me. There is certainly something about music that I don’t understand; it probably lies mostly in our own minds but I for one can be moved to tears, imspired by or find myself laughing from listening to music.