linquency (these authors do refer to Dr. King). Further, research has analyzed the political consequences and themes of rock and rap music (e.g. McDonald 1988b), and, most recently, there is increasing attention paid to "violence research" (Gow 1990:2-3; Binder 1993; see, for instance, Verden et al. (1989) found that, among a sample of 187 students, heavy metal fans were just as delinquent as "Top 40" fans). Generally, the nexus violence-music does not seem to find support in the "serious" literature (see, for instance, McDonald (1988a) who does write: "If the PMRC really wants to be effective as a consumer group, what needs to be done is to study both the causes and effects of the attitudes projected throughout rock and roll", p.310). The list goes on. Gow (1990) found no relationship between violence or sex and preference for music videos. Other research found that there was no correlation between musical preferences for rap and rock and behavior problems (Epstein et al. 1990). Armstrongs (1993) analysis of violence in music lyrics revealed that there is just as much violence in country as in rap, and concludes that the differences between the two musical styles are overstated. Research also discovered that a preference for heavy metal is related to delinquency (Singer et al. 1993) and that suicide and country music are correlated (Stack and Gundlach 1992), issues which tell us more perhaps about the state of sociology that about the music and censorship issue (see the discussion by Maguire and Snipes 1994; Stach and Gundlach 1994a,b; Mauk et al. 1994). One researcher has reported how backward messages can be analyzed technically from the perspective of speech phonetics. He provides the reader with 7 instructions on how to produce meaningful backward messages (Walker 1987), but concludes that backward speech is not perceptible and that the whole notion is absurd (Walker 1985). Finally, research has focused on the effects of the record...
