Does Listening to Lil Wayne Make You More Stupider?

By Michael J. Mooney Thu., Mar. 5 2009 at 10:40 AM

Categories: Celebrities, Science, The Arts

Yes, as a matter of fact, it does. That's according to a fun web site created by Virgil Griffith, a 25-year-old CalTech grad student. He created the site (which has since gone down from too much traffic) to compare the kinds of music Facebook users list as their favorite with the average SAT scores of the schools they attend.

The average SAT score for schools where students listen to Beethoven, for example, is 1371. And at the other end of the music/intelligence spectrum, Miami resident Lil Wayne is a favorite of students at schools with an average score of 889. That number earns him the dubious distinction of "Bestest Singer for Stupid People." If there were an award ceremony for such things, Lil Wayne would receive his trophy right before Lil George W. Bush, who'd be a lock in the "Bestest President" category.

This study is far from scientific and certainly can't claim that listening to Lil Wayne causes you to score lower on the SAT or vice versa -- "was it the chicken or the egg?" New Times' copyeditor Keith Hollar likes to say. But it's still fun for me to think of this as proof that U2 listeners are smarter than people who like Kenny Chesney. And Radiohead fans are smarter than Justin Timberlake lovers. And that Nickelback really is bad for society.

You can see a graph of the full results here. *A note to readers, be careful not to confuse intelligent person favorite Guster with the unlisted favorite of the truly superhumanly intelligent people: Gunther. Hola, hola.