The Most Depressingly Naive Music Questions On Yahoo Answers

One of the greatest aspects of the internet is unarguably the way it has opened doors to a wealth of information that would previously have been available only to select, privileged groups in society, giving the 21st-century masses free and unfettered, effortless access to a mind-boggling amount of social and intellectual enrichment about which our forebears could only have loftily dreamed.

Despite having a solid chunk of world history at the tip of their fingers via Google and Wikipedia, though, the garbage dump of human thought that is Yahoo Answers has inexplicably continued to thrive as confused individuals turn to their no-better-informed peers to ask often apparently earnest questions steeped entirely either in subjectivity or, at the other extreme, widely known/easily searchable fact, neither of which is a necessary thing with which to be bothering others. You can just speak at your phone and ask it whether B.B. King ever played the tuba or not; there is absolutely no reason to be proudly owning your own ignorance to the point of asking other living beings about it.

So, in the interests of expediting the process a little bit for all future question-askers, we thought we'd attempt to answer some of the most baffling and/or overly specific queries on Yahoo Answers, because we're just good people like that.

Q: "what ever happened to good music?"

Presuming this query isn't some bored kid's idea of a joke — considering its list of "good music" includes Ashlee Simpson, Lil Jon, *NSYNC, Hoobastank, Nickelback and 3 Doors Down, it's honestly up in the air — you have to be living a willfully ignorant existence to be asking this question now, when there is more music available at once to the people alive today than there has been in the entire cumulative history of human creative endeavour.

Given an hour of exploration with Spotify, Bandcamp, SoundCloud or any other service through which musicians are reaching the world these days, you would have to be a literal inanimate carbon rod to not walk away with at least one new artist to have piqued your interest. Trust us, it's time much better spent than wistfully reminiscing about still-active musicians as though they're long-dead legends of eons past.

q: "isn't katy perry NOT country?"

Yahoo Answers is full to overflowing with queries about whether a particular artist slots into a particular genre despite that information usually being visible on Wikipedia without even having to scroll that far, but this question is particularly amazing because it goes to such clumsily extreme linguistic lengths to make its point.

Instead of merely asking the community, "Is Katy Perry country?" like a normal human being would, the asker brings their apparent debate with a sibling over Katy Perry's style to Yahoo Answers in an indignantly passive-aggressive manner in which they're not really asking anyone to actually answer them either way so much as just agree with them. "My sister thinks that Katy Perry's music is country -_- I know she isn't but she won't believe me lol", they write.

Or, the whole thing in other words: "Look, it would have been really easy to solve this dispute in a less public manner but isn't my sister a stupid asshole?"

q: "is willie nelson dead?"

Questions that could be solved by having been entered into Google instead of Yahoo Answers: this one. Also this one, about whether the red-headed stranger had an affair with Dolly Parton, who is also the subject of debate as far as whether or not she's related to Billy Ray Cyrus. These types of questions are just sad because they're unnecessary double-handling, which anyone who's ever worked a service job will tell you is a massive waste of everyone's time.

It's not even a case of chastising the askers for being naive about music so much as being depressed that, in 2015, people think it's still easier to trust other human beings — who have historically proven themselves to be giant dicks — with their questions about whether or not a celebrity is still drawing breath. We are a species that routinely invents death stories about people for the hell of it, you know, just to see the look on Gary's face, and that was before the internet really brought out the monsters within.

q: "can you smoke a cigarette and sing at the same time?"

This is what happens when you don't allow the tobacco industry to advertise how cool smoking is. People forget about every musician in the '70s and then are forced to turn to Yahoo Answers and videos of Lana Del Rey that appear really high up on the search results page when you just Google "smoking while singing" to determine whether it is humanly possible to breathe.

Like... that is essentially what this question is asking: "Can you breathe while singing?"

Q: "am i allowed to say ***** if it's part of a rap song?"

No. Just wanted to nip this one in the bud while we're here. Although it bears mentioning that white people being unsure of what is and isn't OK for them to do and say as fans of hip hop does seem to be a running theme, so maybe the first-hand advice provided by the Yahoo Answers community actually can be a useful driver of intelligent discussion and socio-cultural progress and understanding.

That said, it's also a breeding ground for trolls and bigots, so the only question you need to ask yourself about Yahoo Answers is whether it's worth wading through a quagmire of disappointment in order to find an oasis of rational thought, but in all honesty you'd probably be better off just hitting up Twitter — and that's saying something.