

Bring your daughter to the slaughter (for improved exam results): Metal fans at Ozzfest, Donnington Park. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

As Metallica once said, let it be written. It's not the students who love Radiohead that are likely to be the brainiest in their University but the kid down the hall with the Tool t-shirt and a fixation with the floor. A study published today reveals that a disproportionate number of members in the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (a body of 120,000 students which represents the top 5% of academic achievement) list heavy metal - or "metal", as its devotees these days know it - as their favourite kind of music.

Should we be surprised that people who spend a good deal of their day headbanging should be the ones who later in life will get their heads around nuclear fission? Of course we shouldn't. Metal in 2007 no longer concerns itself with silver spandex strides and songs about dragons. Instead it manages to be challenging and uncommercial, exactly the kind of thing a kid who stands apart from the mainstream would find appealing. It's noisier than it ever was and it takes effort to understand it. If you're a Mensa member whose best friend is a book of scientific equations then it's no surprise that you might fall in love with a band whose rhythmic tendencies are the musical equivalent of Einstein's theory of relativity.

The popular perception, though, still suggests otherwise. In my day job as features writer for Kerrang! magazine I've interviewed plenty of metal musicians, and plenty of them have been so stupid that two IQ points less would mean they'd need milking each morning. But plenty more have been just the opposite. What is more striking, though, is the assumption from outside that anyone associated with the genre is brick thick. It doesn't matter that in recent years Atlanta band Mastodon have released an album based on Herman Melville's Moby Dick or that Californian band Thrice have written music inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel V. What matters is that people who like the Smiths are understood to be smart while people who listen to Slayer are reckoned to be otherwise. Case shut.

This at least proves one thing: that metal is still the music of the underdog. Patronised and insulted, even the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth recognises its metal loving alumni suffers "low self esteem" and has "difficulties with friendships and family relationships". Such afflictions can vary from bodies scarred from self-mutilation to simply being a bit rubbish at discos. But the combination of volume and alienation finds friends in lonely places. Popular consensus may have Morrissey or Thom Yorke as poster boys for the lonely hearts' club clientele, but it is metal, and it will always be metal, that is the true voice of the outsider. And it doesn't take a genius to understand that.