In a week, my street will again be closed to roll out the red carpet for the fan-voted CMT Music Awards, a night where the Average Joe decides who best expresses in musical form the malaise of a life of run-down trucks and sickly stray dogs.
While some will inevitably feel compassion for the stars who force artifical, botox-meliorated smiles along with polite claps when their rivals’ names are announced, my real concern is for the fans. As professors Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach reported in a study several years ago, listening to country music causes you to kill yourself:
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 effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun availability. The existence of a country music subculture is though to reinforce the link between country music and suicide.
The authors conclude that someone already at risk of suicide can be pushed over the (figurative) edge by listening to musical reinforcements of themes such as alcoholism and alienation. Unfortunately, the study suffers from two common fallacies in interpreting causality.
First, that prolonged exposure to country music can lead some to rip off their own ears, even at risk of death, can be explained by many much simpler theories. For example, this could simply be because a majority of the population is not deaf. Alternately, those with elementary school-age children may have tired of the simplistic rhyme patterns (“weather,” “better,” and “sweater”? “freedom and “need’em”? Really, Mr Urban).
Second, always check if reversing the hypothesized causality is equally sensible. Why conclude that listening to country music causes one to give up on all pleasurable pursuits on earth, rather than the other way around?
Addendum: I apologize to elementary school-age children for equating your creativity to that of country music’s greatest. I expect most kids (unlike Patty Loveless) would know the difference between horribly executed puns and clever song titles. Case in point: “Timber! I’m Falling in Love.”
Well I was drunk
the day my Mom
got out of prison
And I went
to pick her up
in the rain
But before
I could get to the station
in my pick up truck
she got ran over
by a damned old train
Oh… that is the truest country and western song
Oh Sary, you’ll never make it in the country music business. The right lyric is not “ran over” but “runned over” (of course). I swear to it!