Part of what makes metal so great is that it’s very primal and instinctive. It doesn’t have to involve too much thinking if you don’t want it to. To quote Carl from Aqua Teen, “I don’t need no instructions to know how to rock.”

That said, according to a recent ten-year lyrical study by Seatsmart.com, rockers might be fucking with the learning curve. Among the genres feature, rock had the worst grades, with lyrics coming in at approximately a second-grade reading level. It was beaten by Country, Pop, and RB/Hip-Hop. Stop and consider that: modern country lyrics are more intelligent than modern rock lyrics. Modern rock lyrics are less intelligent than those of a genre containing Katy Perry.

Depressed yet? There’s more! While the highest-ranking song featured in the study was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dani California,” it was also found that among a select group of hit-making hard rock artists, Nickelback was the most intelligent, beating out Linkin Park, Seether, and Avenged Sevenfold. The lowest-ranking were Three Days Grace’s “The Good Life” and Ozzy Osbourne’s “Let Me Hear You Scream”.

Here’s the thing: this study is based on Billboard-ranking songs, so obviously this doesn’t really represent metalheads. As Vince once pointed out when he was baffled by Pop Evil’s continued success, this is all about the music that gets played on car stereos around the country. Of course radio rock is stupid — it needs to be easy to consume by the largest number of people possible. Bands like Pig Destroyer, Watain, The Black Dahlia Murder, and Mantar, all of whom have awesome lyrics, weren’t even a blip on the radars of the people behind this study.

That said, it’s pretty pathetic when a country fan can walk up to the average rocker and say, “I’m smarter than you.” Hopefully, this is a wake-up call to the big arena rock yarlers to make their lyrics a little less moronic. But it probably won’t be, because they’re making that arena rock money and as such don’t care if someone calls them stupid. For those dudes, there’s nothing stupid about a $200 shirt.

[via Loudwire]