If only he'd grown up in Birmingham ... Finland's Mr Lordi. Photograph: Kimmo Mantyla/AFP/Getty Images
Location affects the music you choose and the music you create - only a fool would argue otherwise. While Rakim naively insisted "it ain't where you from, it's where you at", Mobb Deep correctly responded with "fuck where ya at, it's where ya from". Havoc and Prodigy knew that their grim nihilism was as much a product of the social decay of Queensbridge Housing Projects as the subtropical hedonism of Miami Bass was of the booty dancers and night-long parties on South Beach. It's the same in dance music - the bleak industrial landscape of 1980s Michigan produced the harsh sound of Detroit techno, a million miles away from the sun frazzled Balearic beats emerging from the Mediterranean at the same time. But now Uncut magazine are claiming there is a direct correlation between where you are in the UK and the beats-per-minute that gets your toes tapping. In a nutshell, the further north you are the faster you like your beats. Can this be for real?
I think I'm buying this theory. The two big location-specific influences on a region's musical tastes are the climate and the economy. It only takes a few clicks down the social deprivation scale and a few clicks down the Fahrenheit scale to produce a more hostile, aggressive sound and that's what I think is happening in the wee bit colder, wee bit poorer north. In music, speed usually equals aggression so voilà - there's your neat explanation. Outrageous simplifications aside, there's some interesting info in this project even if you're not a survey junkie like myself. It confirms other already suspected regional trends. Here in the West Midlands, the strong Caribbean presence means that reggae and lovers' rock have always been big. In the east, Nottingham cements its status as Rock City by having more metallers per capita than early 90s Seattle. The West Country shows solidarity with the incarcerated Andy Kershaw by rocking world beats and the Goth colonisation of the city of Leeds continues unabated. Truly, we live in dark times.
So what are the subtleties of regional taste that this survey has missed? And does the North really dance to a different drum? If you remain a sceptic and think that location really doesn't matter just ask yourself: would all those Scandinavian black metallers really be boiling each other's brains for soup if they had more than one hour's sunlight a day and there was a half-decent beach volleyball court on their doorstep?
There's a much longer piece on this subject by Laura Barton in today's G2. Read it here.
