No. It's impossible to make assumptions about a person's intelligence based on what music they like. Or films, or books, or clothes, or anything.

Intelligence and taste are different things, and unrelated.

Edited afterthought: I say "impossible to make assumptions about", but people do make such assumptions. I've seen it done, and on these very boards. Perhaps "impossible to measure" is a better way of putting it.

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What kind of music do you listen to, tommac?

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Tommac - I are going to tell you what the most smartest music is:

You take your Eminem and mix it with your Pink Floyd (add a liberal dose of Tool); sprinkle in some Rachmaninov, a little Beethoven, and a touch of Bach with a handful of Tchaikovski; stir in some Duke Ellington, Muddy Waters and a heap of Keb' Mo'; grab some Outkast, a bit of DMX, and some Fugees; Bjork, Evanescence and Regina Spektor always go well; get some La Esperanza, Andy Palacio, and some Youssou N'Dour and shake it up -- heck there's lots of options!

But whatever you do: don't get any of that country music from the last 25 years. It's all bad (except for early Shania Twain: which is best watched on "mute.")

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Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

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"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

Pretty good mix, except the "Tchaikovski" bit sent it down to comingle with current Nashville offal.

Still curious to know what the OP listens to.

Barry Manilow? With some Bobby Goldsboro thrown in for contrast?

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Pop music is, by definition, average music; music for the masses. It can be sometimes bad, sometimes sublime. Now, it requires some degree of intelligence to compose things like the Brandenburg concertos, but not necessarily to hear them.

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I like canons and cannons...

Of course, since I used to do this professionally, this is my favorite percussion instrument

You don't so much hear, as feel the bass!

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Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life.
- Goethe

Jump in with both feet!
- Me, indulging my inner eight-year-old

*** *** ***

"Are you a mad-hatter that just types what he wishes, or have you actually any physics training?"
Occam's Ghost to Grant Hutchison.

Do we know Bach was intelligent - could he do much else than write and perform music? (He also seems to have been rather effective at procreation.)

I expect that most classical composers, even top ones, would be unable to write successful pop music. I bet they wish they could do it too. So I would say it requires some special skill, talent, intelligence (call it what you will) to write good music of any type. I think journalists of tabloid newspapers have also convincingly suggested that what they do is actually more difficult than being a journalist on a serious newspaper.

Back in Mozart's time the distinction between popular and classical didn't exist to the same degree as today. Opera, etc, had mass popularity then.

Although one might argue that a degree of knowledge and experience (which might imply some reasonable intelligence), is necessary to appreciate the more "elite" kinds of classical music, I think actually some degree of acculturation is necessary to appreciate many kinds of music. When I was in the Middle East, a lot of people there told me that they really didn't like western music, by which they meant pop. I can't say I liked what they were listening to either.

When I was fairly young (about age 10 onwards) I came to hate pop music. My views have much mellowed since, and these days I enjoy a lot of the stuff I hated then. I think this was in part because a lot of stuff that became temporarily popular in my youth really was rubbish, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenant_Pigeon, and has not stood the test of time. I couldn't understand why people didn't see it as rubbish at the time. There were too few gems in the rubbish to my mind, and sifting through the rubbish for the gems was intolerable to me. (It was also probably part of a deliberate policy of interesting myself in abstruse things, and thus avoiding in principle anything of widespread popularity.) Whereas most classical music that was played was played precisely because it had stood the test of time. Though I have also listened to a lot of first performances of classical music (I used to be a regular Proms-goer, that is the BBC Promenade Concerts) and quite a lot of those were rubbish too (and arguably intolerable to listen to, I recall using the phrase "mercifully short" fairly often), retaining no popularity with audiences, so perhaps I'm just being inconsistent. I also enjoy folk music and jazz, both minority taste in Britain.

beatles
zep
bob dylan
joan baez
the who
cake
einstein ( audio book )
hawking ( audio book )
head hunters
velvet underground
grateful dead

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leonard cohen rocks!!!

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Now there's a type of music I believe really is all about stupidity, and meant for dumb people and to make people dumber. They simplified it by taking out melody, then they simplified it more by taking out most of the musical accompaniment and harmony, then they simplified it some more by reducing the range of allowable kinds of beat & rhythm, then they simplified it some more by eliminating most of the range of human emotions from it so it was only allowed to express the same few emotions over and over again and never any of the rest of life... and the emotions they chose to make it all about just happen to be the dumbest state of the human mind, advocating and advertising and adulating dumb, destructive attitudes and patterns of behavior that can only make life worse for self, family, associates, and community. So ya, THAT is dumb music for dumb people to get dumber to.

Most of the music you just named was pop music.

You ever seen World Series of Dice on the chappelle show?

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"Banned by BAUT" Alumni (2008)

Yeah, no doubt. It shows that it all depends on the 'zeitgeist'. I also think that the frontier between musical genres are somewhat fuzzy. Take Rick Wakeman, for instance, a 'pop' artist/musician. He´s flirted with the 'classic' language with pretty good results. And Mozart, as you say, used to be kinda pop artist in his time. So, maybe there will come a time when Pink Floyd is considered highbrow music

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Not sure that is why I asked the question. Like I couldnt picture anyone that is smart listening to britney spears. It seems that music like classical and jazz seem to attract people who want to be smart. I think because the music itself is more difficult to play and they really push the limits of music theory. However I am not sure that pushing music theory makes something more enjoyable to listen to. I play Bass and I started learning beatles songs. Even though they are fairly simple to play, harmonically paul is a genius. Every note he plays is perfect. Are the beatles considered pop ... i guess at one time they were. However looking back looking at the work that they have done it is incredible.

I also like zep and from a different direction john paul jones is probably my favorite bass player. Personally I think he drove the zeppelin. The thing is that he plays such incredible bass lines and unless you are listening for the bass and learning to play the songs it really can get lost in the jimi page leads.

For jazz ... I think my fav musician is either miles davis or herbie hancock ... I like the stuff they did around the 70s where anything goes. miles used to tell herbie that it is OK to practice on your own time ... but when they went on stage he didnt want to hear any of that stuff that he had been practicing. He wanted to hear something totally new. So all of the stuff they did was just pure jamming ... something that comes out almost without thinking ... just from their experiences non filtered very raw.

So then you compare this stuff to pop ... or at least modern pop. why do people like pop? Really this is mass controlled by the record industry. they control what the radio stations play and what the djs say about the stuff.

So I am not sure if pop is natural to like or if it is something people are being programmed to like. On the other hand if something is just that mass likeable ... maybe there is a genius behind it. Some sort of talent to make music that is loved by the masses however usually hated by the music afficianados.

But I still think that it is too easy to like pop ... it almost seems lazy ... like ah yes music is good so let me listen to what everyone else is listening too.

But that is also part of my personality to look for the rare stuff that people dont know but is genius but somewhat forgotton.

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News Flash! Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Bach, etc did not write "classical" music. They wrote "pop" music for the people of their time.

When asked what would be considered "classical" music two hundred years from now, Leonard Bernstein said "you're listening to it"!

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But we don't call that kind of pop music "pop music". The term hadn't been invented yet, then.
For that matter, not all so-called "pop music" is popular. Think of the psychedelic experiments of the sixties. Or of music from a couple of decades ago that has been forgotten.

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I sometimes find it interesting to speculate about what old artists--musicians and writers, mostly--would be doing if they were alive today. I think Mozart would be doing things not unlike Danny Elfman, actually. A rock band and film scores and whatever else caught his interest. Bach would almost certainly still be writing mostly church music, simply because he was a religious guy. His secular stuff was largely to pay the bills. (He certainly took "be fruitful and multiply" to heart!) But at their heart, they would be doing what they loved, and I can't really know what that would be.

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"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

"Classical" composers also wrote works that were more explicitly intended for an elite audience, eg much of the output court composers, such as Haydn. I think a lot of what Beethoven wrote was not appreciated by the mass audience of the day, in fact they found it rather unintelligible. There was a bit of a battle over the direction of music in his time, which he won, but possibly at the expense of sending classical music in the direction of elite audiences. Much of the mass-popularity music from this era, mainly opera, has been almost completely forgotten, and no longer gets performed. Some of the hugely popular composers of the time are now so obscure (Italians aside) I can't remember their names. Also explicitly popular composed genre such as music-hall started to arise from about this time or little later, which really did drive a wedge between elite and popular music, though in Italy opera retained its mass popularity for much longer. Of course kings also attended music-hall.