It's a truism as old as rock n' roll itself - the longer your hair, the harder you rock. Of course, there have been exceptions: Helmet generally had short hair across the board, but it's just as generally accepted that they were solid ass-kickers in the rocking-out department. Michael Bolton, on the other hand, possessed the locks of angels, but couldn't rock himself out of wet linen blazer (not that we would have wanted him to).

It's seldom the case, however, that long hair does not equal hard rock quality. Jason Fisher at The Gauntlet agrees, and took time out from headbanging to apply pure numbers to this hypothesis. The variables at play are hair length and average critics' score. Where exactly do the numbers come from? Who cares. The results speak for themselves:



Remember when Metallica cut their hair in the mid-90s? Of course you don't. THAT'S WHAT THIS CHART IS SAYING. And as the right of the graph shows, the addition of the fair-maned Robert Trujillo clearly increased the quality of Metallica's recent work. You can't argue with numb3rs.