Why Do The Big Questions Always Come Up At 3:00 AM?

i listened to a sonic youth record and woke up the next morning and started doing altruistic things despite my very nature. it was scary. so i put on cannibal corpse, and, yay, it was back to serial killing and corpse raping.

You did the right thing.

songs about politics are written to try to convice the listener that the artists political standpoint is right/worth considering,etc

songs about raping pigs and killing children are rarely written with the intention of trying to persuade their listeners to do so

thus,political songs try to influence peoples behaviour through arguement,which can't be said for marilyn manson (i presume)

so rock fans are succeptable to argument but not sensational gory parent baiting?

I'm only succepptable to backwards masking. you have to trick me...
get the gun get the gun shoot shoot shoot !!!!!!!

i've always been of the opinion that no-one should be directly influenced by an artist they love. but david.a is right, the artists who claim that they can "make a difference" are generally the ones that will say that music makes no "difference" when it comes to negative behaviour. no-one SHOULD be influenced either way.

Hopefully, if you have a conscience, you will allow yourself to be positively influenced by positive messages and you will use the negative message to form a positive influence. (That's called irony.) So, unless you are a dimwit or predisposed to antisocial behavior, you should be influenced toward the moral positive no matter what the artist is telling you.

preemptive answer: some messages carry more influence than others. e.g. "Peppermints and Lollipops" carries very little influence.

This is a good question, but really the only way to answer it would be to do some serious research and look at the results of altruistic music vs. antisocial music. There are cases where it could be said that music influenced crimes, ie Columbine, death metal church burnings, Judas Priest suicides, etc., but you'd have to look at other influences as well (peer group, family life, etc). And the same is true for the opposite: you could look at how peoples' political beliefs change from listening to music, but again you'd have to allow for other influences as well. So basically, it would be a huge pain in the ass to figure out definitively, so let's just go on guessing like we were before I said all this crap.

No, Nick - let's talk about that .. (that sounds like a psychologist er sumpthin)

Do you think the music influenced the crimes, or the music was an excuse for the crimes? The kids who have committed murders or suicides and blamed music ... wanted to do it because of 100 other influences that misshaped their minds.. And then they heard a song that reinforced what they already thought.... Charles Manson thought that Rocky Raccoon was about the black race rising up and taking over the world... It wasn't, but he made it fit his agenda. He was already deranged long before the White Album came out.

Yeah, I guess it would be pretty silly to say there was one thing that made someone commit a crime. Seems like it would have to be a combination of factors, one of which could be cultural (movie, video game, musical, etc.), but cultural factors seem unlikely to be enough to make someone commit a crime. I don't think there's any definitive way to answer your question at the beginning of your paragraph.

Do Rage Against The Machine fans really believe all the leftist rhetoric being spouted at them is sincere despite the major label/corporate connections the band has? I don't think their messages are taken seriously.

Fugazi live what they write songs about (I guess; it's hard to say many of their songs are explicitly political). They produce and release their own records, they book their own tours, etc. Thus, many people take them seriously.

If Cannibal Corpse went around murdering children and raping nubile young women, people might take them a bit more seriously. Of course, their fanbase would shrink immensely because people tend to be repulsed by such things.

I think it's the behaviour of the artists more than the lyrics to their songs that influences (or tries to influence) the behavior of their fans. If Band A writes a song about boycotting child labor but performs wearing Nikes, they're not going to be taken seriously (by people able to see the outright hypocrisy.) If Band B espouses veganism and abstinence from drugs and alcohol, and lives that lifestyle, then their music/message is more likely to influence people. (Taking extreme straight edge was the first example that really stood out to me; bands got the shit beaten out of them [and maybe they still do] for "selling out the edge" or whatever, so at least /someone/ takes the message seriously.)

Saying that you shouldn't let music influence how you think is ridiculous; It's the same as any other type of art. I can look at a photograph of mass graves during the holocaust and be upset by it; listening to a song about the same thing and not being upset wouldn't make any sense. If music didn't make us feel, why would any of us listen to it? Even if it's as simple an emotion as "that makes me happy" or "that sucks," it's still a reaction one can't help but have.