A Tear in Your Beer ?

[Anonymous]

Old (2004) by now, but worth passing along.

A study showing the link between country music and suicide has taken one of the top prizes in this year's Ig-Nobel awards - the humorous alternative to the Nobel prizes.

Other winners include the inventor of the karaoke machine, the man who patented the "comb-over" for covering the head of bald men and a student who investigated the danger of eating food that has fallen on the floor. The 10 winners of the 2004 Ig-Nobel prizes - which celebrate the bizarre, weird, funny and improbable elements of genuine scientific inquiry - received their awards last night at a ceremony at Harvard University in Boston.

Marc Abrahams, who conceived the awards 14 years ago, said that the "Igs" are given to studies or inventions judged to have done most in making people laugh and then think. Mr Abrahams, who publishes the Journal of Improbable Research, said the prizes honour the "whipped cream of humanity", or those thinkers who are either eccentrically brilliant or brilliantly eccentric.

The medicine prize was won by Steven Stack of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and James Gundlach of Auburn University in Alabama, who published an investigation into the effect of country music on suicide. The study found that country music, with its emphasis on marital discord, alcoholism and social alienation, can be linked with an increased suicide rate.

"The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate," the two researchers found.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world
/science_technology/story.jsp?story=567654

:face:

 

[MisterE]

Country kills Martians too!

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[Anonymous]

My proposal (when I worked in the Juvenile Reformatory) to "adjust the attitudes" of defiant "inner city youth" by locking them in a room and playing country music until they buckled was administratively deemed "abusive."

:face:

 

[MisterE]

My proposal (when I worked in the Juvenile Reformatory) to "adjust the attitudes" of defiant "inner city youth" by locking them in a room and playing country music until they buckled was administratively deemed "abusive."

:face:

Are you serious? I guess it would depend on how loud it is. The army played rock music loudly around the clock to flush Manuel Noriega out of the church where he was holed up. It works as a psycholgical torture. But country music would just the musical version of having to sit in the corner for a while.

 

[Anonymous]

That particular crop of them (Philly, ca. 1990) detested it.

Rap ? Now that was music !

:face:

 

[RDPipes]

Apparently that just goes to prove, anyone without a soul cant stand Country Western Music. And those whom like RAP obviously haven't a taste for music.

 

[Rob_In_MO]

Well...

Let's consider the situation depicted in most older Country Music Songs.

The wife left you, the truck broke down, lost the ranch, the horses ran off, the cattle were stolen, the town hates you, and the dog died!

What the hell else is there left? I can see a relation in higher suicide rates here.

 

[MisterE]

Is it the music itelf which causes suicidal depression or does the music merely reflect a demographic which is more prone to it?

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

 

[Hermit]

Is it the music itelf which causes suicidal depression or does the music merely reflect a demographic which is more prone to it?

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

What are the stats for Leonard Cohen fans? :lol!:

 

[RDPipes]

Well...

Let's consider the situation depicted in most older Country Music Songs.

The wife left you, the truck broke down, lost the ranch, the horses ran off, the cattle were stolen, the town hates you, and the dog died!

What the hell else is there left? I can see a relation in higher suicide rates here.

Country Western music, Real life situations, music that most of us can relate to no matter how much we hate to admit it. Instead of this new age BS singing about things of the supernatural and that will never happen and Rap crap about popping a cap in someone because he scratch your car.
And if music is going to control someone that much to commit suicide I think they have worse problems, like the lack of courage and or mental fortitude.

 

[MisterE]

Is it the music itelf which causes suicidal depression or does the music merely reflect a demographic which is more prone to it?

Which came first the chicken or the egg?

What are the stats for Leonard Cohen fans? :lol!:

Didn't he do big concert in Jonestown, Guyana sometime in the late '70s?? :lol!: :lol!:

 

[Rob_In_MO]

And if music is going to control someone that much to commit suicide I think they have worse problems, like the lack of courage and or mental fortitude.

True. I can't help but remember the big uproar in the 80's about some kid killing himself and his parents found Ozzy Osbourne in his cassette player. When they hit 'Play' it was on the infamous song 'Suicide Solution'...

Of course fans know that the song doesn't promote suicide at all, it actually warns against it! But try telling that to the masses that hate Ozzy and similar types of music.

 

[Josjor]

I remember the Ozzy thing and I also remember when Paul Harvey went on a binge blaming Dungeons And Dragons for teen suicide. Bunk really, but still.............

I think it's equally hazardous to say that media (be it music, movies, television, internet, or even games) don't influence us in large ways. Otherwise how would you account for the billions of dollars spent on advertising? If it media didn't influence us then business wouldn't spend money on it.