dancing with kittens

Via Boing Boing, an article in the British Medical Journal from 2008 that includes such gems as:

To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.

Sounds reasonable.

Though exposure to head banging is enormous, opportunities are present to control this risk—for example, encouraging bands such as AC/DC to play songs like "Moon River" as a substitute for "Highway to Hell"; public awareness campaigns with influential and youth focused musicians, such as Sir Cliff Richard; labelling of music packaging with anti-head banging warnings, like the strategies used with cigarettes; training; and personal protective equipment.

*snorts*

We can also use the theoretical model to estimate the injury levels to two of the greatest head bangers, Beavis and Butt-head. When head banging at a tempo of 164 beats per minute to "I Wanna be Sedated" the range of motion of Beavis’ head and neck is about 45°, which is below any injury threshold of both the head and neck injury criteria. Butt-head, however, preferred to head bang with a range of motion of about 75°. This activity is below any Neck Injury Criteron threshold, but level one head injuries are predicted by the Head Injury Criterion, with the symptoms being headaches and dizziness. It is well understood, however, that cartoon characters are able to tolerate greater than normal impacts without injury.

I'm glad we're all clear on that.

Possible interventions to reduce the risk of injury caused by head banging include limiting the range of neck motion through a formal training programme delivered before a concert; substitution of adult oriented rock and easy listening music such as the controls, or others including Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, Enya, and Richard Clayderman, for heavy metal; and personal protective equipment such as neck braces to limit range of motion.

Richard Clayderman! (BRB, watching "Heartbroken" again.)

Some of the Rapid Responses are great, too. "Dion and Clayderman, while accomplished musicians, simply lack the incisive sociological comment and educational value of heavy metal." And from a biomechanical engineer:

Testing conducted in our laboratory on 20 instrumented human volunteers demonstrates that head banging produces trivial head accelerations, far below suggested thresholds for even mild brain injury. In fact, plopping down in a chair and slapping one’s forehead generated higher head accelerations than head banging.

Ok, so while this was clearly tongue in cheek, I gotta say I'm really disappointed that they didn't go into other styles of headbanging beyond the basic up and down.

And now I really want to go to a live and do some headbanging ;_;