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I know what you're thinking.
"Is this true? I mean, really true?"
And the answer is: yes, yes it is.
It's something that vinyl-owners have known, deep-down, for many years but science has been unable to back-up this claim... until now. After a medical study lasting a staggering four-and-a-half months, the experts have finally come to the definitive conclusion: listening to vinyl makes you sexier, and it's now a fact totally backed up by science, thanks to the work of Benjamin Taffy and his research team at the Scientific Testing University Partnership of Influential Doctors.
"There are a lot of things which are still not proven by science as actual fact," Doctor Taffy told us. "Gravity. Oxygen. The Moon landings. Dinosaurs. All of these things, and more, are still being studied and I don't think there will be a consensus in the scientific community about whether any of these things actually exist or existed. Certainly not in my lifetime, and not just mine. I have no doubt at all that my great-great grandchildren will got through life not knowing for certain what shape the Earth is exactly.
But now we know for certain, that records - playing them, touching them, owning them, hell, even just talking about them - makes you a bonafide sexual tyrannosaurus. Assuming the Tyrannosaurus actually existed, of course."
We still don't know for certain if the Tyrannosaurus Rex actually roamed the Earth, despite photographic evidence which some experts claim were faked.
Benjamin Taffy is a world-leading doctor of Aural Otitiscology - the study of physical media in the genre of music - and six months ago was researching the effects of audio sonic wave forms - aka Music - on middle-aged chimpanzees, when he noticed strange behaviour occurring amongst the primates.
"Usually Frank - our intern - would stand in the corner and sing the Albanian national anthem," Taffy remembers. "And we'd give the chimps a box of funny hats and just let them get on with it. But one day Frank brought in a record player, one of those small portable ones that folded into a suitcase. It had an Enya LP in there and as soon as he started to play it you could sense a change in the room. For one thing, the chimps stopped violently biting him around the face and neck, and there was much less faeces flinging."
Things got even weirder when the chimps were allowed to play the album of their own accord.
"The chimpanzee which played the record first basically became king pimp for the rest of the day. At first we thought it might have just been the music of Enya, but over the rest of the week we tried several different records too: Glen Campbell. Dire Straits. Cattle Decapitation. Toto. All had the same effect: an animalistic orgy with the record-playing protagonist at the centre of it all, like a spinning storm of musk-drenched anthropoidal debauchery.
Poor Frank."
Doctor Taffy even noticed a change in the behaviour of some members of his research team and concluded that there was more to this than sheer animal amorosity. It only made sense at that point to conduct experiments on human subjects.
"We scientists love fiddling about with human subjects," said Doctor Kathy McSpittenshaft, Taffy's research colleague. "We pretend that we don't, but we do. When Ben approached me with the idea of making humans play records in a controlled environment to see if it made them more sexually attractive, my first question was 'will there be needles and test tubes?' And as soon as he said yes, I was in."
Science.
"We decided to stay in our current research lab," Doctor Taffy remembers. "It was easier than packing up all our glass beakers. All we had to do was scrub the place clean to remove the smell of chimp - our new intern did that - and we were good to go."
After rounding up 1000 volunteers across a wide spectrum of genders and sexual preferences, the tests began.
"We started slowly at first," Doctor McSpittenshaft recalls. "One album a day, usually something by Chicago or Aerosmith. People got amorous, but were not as aggressive or upfront as the chimps had been. Social etiquette was almost certainly a factor at that point. However, as we got deeper into the trials, we amped things up. 7" Mel & Kim singles. A rare Madonna 10" picture disc. Milli Vanilli's All Or Nothing LP. All had the same effect: raw sex for the person playing the record, and mutual touching for those who simply handled the cover. It was becoming very clear that exposure to physical media was bringing out some kind of deep-seeded, almost primordial instinct to physically bond with the ones who had handled the record. Scientific tests on blood done in test tubes with needles and beakers reinforced this.
One day we even gave the control group of 100 people the complete works of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. It resulted in 62 pregnancies."
"Which was confusing," Doctor Taffy added, "as only 50 of the people in the room were female."
Girl, you know it's true.
Doctor Taffy continued. "We noticed a rise in fertility in both male & female subjects. Women who were listening to vinyl for prolonged periods of time started ovulating twice a day for weeks on end, whilst the men were producing nine litres of semen per ejaculate."
"We had to buy larger beakers," Doctor McSpittenshaft reminisces. "And a new mop."
So, how - and why - does this happen? It's all to do with super-charged particles of polygonwindowed alpha nodes in a sonic-waved quantum state.
"It's so simple, really," said Professor Bernard Mungbean, editor of the International Geographic pull-out supplement 'Science On Sunday!' "Once you see it written down, it becomes so obvious that I'm kind of kicking myself in the face that I didn't work it out myself."
Professor Mungbean was formally a lecturer at the esteemed Taft University of Medical Cheese Sciences in California, and was one of the first people to read Taffy & McSpittenshaft's paper "The Effects On Human Libido Through The Appliance Of Vinyl Record Manipulation" before it was published, due to being a life-long friend of Doctor Taffy's father, Saul Taffy.
"The particles of polygonwindowed alpha nodes are released from their sonic-waved quantum state when the needle starts to pick up the sound from the record and transmits the audiowaves to the record amplifier," Professor Mungbean explains. "That's it. That's the Science. I expected it to be something very complex, like the atomic structure of a ripe Brie, but no, it's so simple that even a lover of mild Cheddar could understand it."
Cheese: delicious, but not as much of an aphrodisiac as a Milli Vanilli 7" is.
"Basically, the effects are amplified when the record is played," Dr Taffy expains. "The particles are released just by handling the vinyl. It's why so many record fairs turn into massive sexual saturnalias.
The particles are absorbed by the people around it. The effects wear off eventually, which is why you won't suddenly want to jump bones with someone who listens to vinyl just by passing them in the street. But if you did walk past someone who plays records, your body will pick up on their chemical make-up, and you will find yourself at the very least mildly attracted to them."
But is it only vinyl that has this effect, or could all physical media affect our brains and bodies and blood and chemical make-up this way?
"Next year we're going to look at whether audio cassettes have the same effect," Dr Kathy McSpittenshaft said. "But first we have to figure out how exactly audio cassettes work. The Science community still can't agree on that one."
"For years we've wondered why record collectors are so much more appealing than, say, stamp collectors or people who crochet," Doctor Benjamin Taffy muses. "I'm just glad we've managed to solve this long-running mystery. Science has finally solved something.
And more importantly, we now understand why so many babies are born nine months after Record Store Day."
- Mark Anthony Finch
