Goethe vs. Rammstein: Who is Allowed to Play with Madness? The Influence of Musical Taste on Prejudice against Heavy Metal Lyrics
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For all of its short lifespan, heavy metal music has been regarded as aggressive, depressive and dangerous. Especially people who do not like or listen to this kind of music, seem to have prejudice against the themes of heavy metal songs. One major example is the German rock band Rammstein whose lyrics are often judged as brutal and even right-wing extremist. What is known very well from social psychology is that prejudice influences further information-processing resulting in biased judgements. Therefore, the question arises whether the interpretation of lyrics might be biased, too, depending on the names of authors and subjective musical taste but not on the actual song content. Our explorative study deals with lyric interpretation. In particular, how heavy metal lyrics are perceived depending on musical taste and author name. We chose two different excerpts from a Goethe poem and a Rammstein song. These were presented to our participants who were heavy metal fans and non-fans. They had to read one of the poems and interpret it afterwards. Before reading, they were told that Goethe or Rammstein wrote the following poem, respectively. As expected, fans and non-fans of heavy metal music showed differences concerning their interpretation of lyrics according to the name of the author while actual poem content was not taken into consideration. Specific musical taste seems to influence participants’ perception of lyrics according to author names, resulting in biased judgement. This bias in lyric perception might be due to specific associations with heavy metal music due to prejudice against this kind of music.