Commentary by Amanda Krysinski

Listen to the story!

Time and time again, teachers, parents and friends tell me that listening to the randomly screamed lyrics of heavy-metal music will rot my brain.

But, I just can't agree.

One of my parents' major complaints about my music is that it doesn't qualify as music. There isn't an understandable chorus in most songs, and the lyrics are, well, difficult to understand. But maybe that's what I find so appealing.

When I turn up a Marilyn Manson CD to high volume, it effectively drowns out all those little obnoxious sounds you don't really notice until you're trying to concentrate. But perhaps the best part of, say, Slipknot, in comparison to Britney Spears is that I can't understand the lyrics. This means I don't get distracted by singing, "Hit me baby one more time" when I'm trying to prove "angle XYZ" is congruent to "angle ABC."

So, I crank up the volume on my CD player, and I can do my geometry in peace and relative quiet.

By the time I get home from school and sit down to do my homework, my cats are meowing for food, my brothers are off wrestling somewhere--quite possibly directly above my room--and my parents are in the kitchen talking, cooking dinner and watching the evening news. All the while, I'm sitting in my room, trying to decipher what the heck Washington Irving was trying to say in "The Devil and Tom Walker."

It looks like it's Disturbed to the rescue yet again. With the first notes of heavy bass, all the little noises that drive me crazy disappear, leaving me free to find the deeper, metaphorical meaning of a ghost story written over two hundred years ago.

If you've ever sat at a stop light next to a car playing really loud music, you may have noticed that all you can hear is a dull roar and the occasional thrum of some heavy bass. That's what a lot of the music I listen to sounds like at normal volume.

If I really need to concentrate and need total silence, I can't just yell shut up and expect the whole household go on mute. So, what's a girl to do but compete? With heavy metal music, I can turn up a song being screamed in complete monotone and all those sounds are gone.

One of the things I like about heavy metal is that it's hard to get distracted by the lyrics. When you hear Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama," or Faith Hill's "There You'll Be," it 's easy to get those lyrics stuck in your head. Sometimes that means you're singing along to that stuff all day.

I don't need that happening to me when I'm at school. It's difficult enough to take notes on the Battle of Saratoga without finding myself scribbling pop music words in the margins of my paper.

Heavy metal is totally different. It took me almost a week to decipher the lyrics of just one song off my new Disturbed CD, and once I figured them out...well, let's just say I don't sing them to my mom.

If you have to listen to something you don't particularly enjoy, it tends to be a distraction, or at least that's what happens in my case. If you prefer Mozart to Morbid Angel, you probably don't want to study to heavy metal. But why should fans of Cannibal Corpse have to listen to Chopin when the distraction level is the same?

I actually appreciate classical music; I even play in my school's orchestra. But "Brandenburg Concerto Number Five" just can't compete with the sound of my brother talking on the phone or the microwave beeping.

For me, a constant sound is ideal for studying. Classical music tends to have dynamics, and pop music tends to have pauses and held notes. With heavy metal, it seems they're trying to get all their rage out at once, which results in a steady stream of yells, guitar and drums. The monotonous roar is a soothing mainland version of the ocean.

If studying or falling asleep to so called "ruckus music" works for you, why not do it? Concentration is different for everyone, just like musical opinion.

If you still don't think anyone can possibly learn while listening to heavy metal, here's a line from Disturbed that sums it all up: "Liberate your mind..."