Nirvana = Coffee, Coldplay = I'll Call You Sometime

With a host of social problems that cry out for fixing and scientific mysteries that demand solving, it's always a pleasure to report on those institutions that are on the front line of investigating and helping us understand the ways of our world. Via the good folks at Buzzfeed.com I stumbled upon a groundbreaking piece of research into the inter-connection between musical tastes and promiscuity that was done by the socially-conscious people at Tastebuds.fm, a musical dating site. As you can see, this chart (click on it to enlarge) measures which fans of a particular musical artist are more likely to "come back for coffee" on the first date.

Is it any surprise that the fans of the only Seattle-based group on the chart are most likely to equate coffee with sex? Nomenclature as destiny in the case of Coldplay? Is it possible for Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich's ego to get any bigger? Got to believe The Strokes, of all bands, are a bit disappointed with these results; even the 40+ year defunct Beatles are more of an aphrodisiac! With Gorillaz charting so respectably, one wonders where that other great cartoon band, The Archies, would fall on the graph. Ahead of Coldplay I'm sure. Am I, who saw the Red Hot Chili Peppers way back in 1985 when they were actually a pretty good band, getting rock-senile because it took me like fifteen minutes to figure out what RHCP stood for?

Not to be outdone by the wonks at Tastebuds, the crack research team here at spitouyourgum (admittedly twiddling their thumbs lately with nothing better to do than ascertaining the obsolete date of steam shovels and determining the continuing commercial viability of Fresca) quickly crunched some numbers and came up with the following data.

• No surprise, I guess, but the people who responded most enthusiastically to the question, "Would you like to come up and check out my collection of Star Wars knick-knacks memorabilia?" are fans of the Alan Parsons Project.
• Surprisingly, to me at least, the people who asked, "What's coffee?" were neither Jonas Brothers fans nor Justin Bieber fans, but overwhelmingly fans of Dan Fogelberg.
• "It's too late for coffee, would you like to come up for a martini instead?" elicited the most favorable responses from the Sinatra-loving set.
• "I hate to be so personal on a first date, but could you come up and help me lance the troublesome boil on back?" scored high with Talking Heads fans.
• Devotees of the Motley Crue oeuvre frothed at the mouth to the question, "Presently I don't have anywhere to 'go up to' but would you like to go to 7-11 and distract the cashier while getting some Slurpees so that I can rip us off some burritos?"
• Fans of Bauhaus couldn't be found to participate in the survey.
• Ironically, fans of Bare Naked Ladies were the ones who scored highest on the question, "Would you like to come up and see the literature promoting the Abstinence Club I'm co-vice-president of?"
• For the forty-fifth consecutive year, fans of the Velvet Underground easily outdistanced all comers when it came to favorably responding to the statement, "Want to shoot some heroin? We'll probably have no interest in sex then, but we can sit around and nod off while talking about Kant." Time to retire that question, I guess.
• Regardless of their own musical tastes, participants in the survey unanimously voted Bob Dylan fans the sexiest and left the testing site involuntarily singing Bob's "One More Cup of Coffee" song.