Ever since Lil' Wayne rapped the words "Don’t fuck with Wayne, cuz when it Waynes it pours," we wondered if listening to could turn our brain into gelatinous mush. Turns out, Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith had the exact same question in mind when he conducted a little test to see if music taste is a predictor of intelligence level. His findings? The shittier your taste in music … the dummer u r @ life.

Ever since Lil' Wayne rapped the words "Don’t fuck with Wayne, cuz when it Waynes it pours," we wondered if listening to could turn our brain into gelatinous mush. Turns out, Caltech grad student Virgil Griffith had the exact same question in mind when he conducted a little test to see if music taste is a predictor of intelligence level. His findings? The shittier your taste in music … the dummer u r @ life.

To figure this out, he used aggregated Facebook data revealing user's favorite bands and plotted it against the average SAT/ACT scores for every college. Or, as he puts it …

Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most frequent "favorite music" at every college via that college's Network Statistics page on Facebook (manually — as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten "favorite musics" are perhaps    indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college. Download the average SAT/ACT score (from CollegeBoard) for students attending every college.
Presto! We have a correlation between musical tastes and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

Sorry, what? We've been listening to Beyonce since 1999 so we couldn't understand that .

Moving on.

According to Virgil's results, the three artists that make you the dumbest are  Lil' Wayne, Soca, Beyonce and Ludacris … which are also the artists that we love to strip to the most. Coincidence? Maybe. About as much of a coincidence as us failing chemistry and getting promoted to lead stripper on the same day.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the smartest people listened to Beethoven, Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens and … Counting Crows?  Did these people get so smart they invented a time machine back to 1995, which is the only feasible year it could be if Counting Crows was playing anywhere other than your buddy's CD store in Telluride?

Counting Crows … WTF?

Don't even get us started on Beethoven.

Here are the rest of his findings.

Wait, Something Corporate makes you smarter than Queen or the Doors? Well, sonny, if that's true, then we don't want to be smart.

And although Virgil makes it clear as Heisenberg Blue Sky that correlation does not indicate causation, he still insists that "The results are hilarity incarnate regardless of causality." But regardless of whether or not it's true that musical taste directly predicts your smarty-pants-ness level, the study does bring up several weird discrepancies.

Like the fact that the chart is more segregated than Alabaman bus terminal in 1943. Or the fact that most country, rap and hip-hop artists show up on the "dumb" end of the spectrum, while the most white-bread, trustafarian Apple Store bands like U2 and Guster live on the "smart end." And then there's Beethoven. There's no one whiter than Beethoven.

Or, you could argue that smarter people don't necessarily indicate their favorite band on Facebook. Or that smart people are worse dancers (ever tried to twerk bitch to Radiohead?). Or that people who listen to Jack Johnson are are all implanted with an alien probe that modulates their intelligence based on the frequency of incoming radio waves.

But whatever impression you get from the chart, one thing's for sure: Listening to Nickelback does make you very, very stupid, and anyone who disagrees can come compare ACT scores with us.