Well hi there!  Welcome back to Pop Science, the series where Ben and I take a look at the glorious inanity that happens when pop culture tries to get all science-like. The whole series is here, and we’ve focused on the good, the bad and the ugly. Today however, we’re doing something a little different: the confusing. These are the lyrics so wildly off base that you can’t even really criticize them. I mean, what does one say to “the color of the sky is 3?”. Let’s find out!

Miracles by Insane Clown Posse
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: Ah, the song that launched a thousand magnet memes.

I could go through and correct this song, I could finally tell Shaggy how magnets work, but instead I’m going to give you my five favorite delightful observations they make about science:

5. “You don’t have to be high to look at the sky”.
4. “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay. It tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away”
3. “Shaggy’s little boys look just like Shaggy. And my little boy looks just like daddy”
2. “Magic everywhere in this bitch. Shit’s crazy”
1. “Water, fire, air and dirt Fucking magnets, how do they work?”

I mean, if this were a classroom, could I even kick this guy out? To say he’s high is an understatement, but is it weird it’s kind of making me laugh? I mean, it’s more entertaining than Hillary Duff, and it takes a certain amount of creativity to turn a couple of those phrases. But I can’t endorse this right? Downfall of America and all that? SO MUCH AMBIVALENCE.

Ben: I have not spent a lot of time in the discography of messieurs Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope since my years working night shifts at McDonald’s, and inexplicably, time has warmed me to their schtick. This song drops me somewhere in a vortex between willful ignorance and playful stereotypes, and I found myself deeply charmed. Seeing Shaggy mime the act of running away while J details his story of almost losing his cell phone to a voracious pelican in a song about unexplainable miracles hits some sort of pleasure nodes I didn’t even know I had.

I wasn’t aware that ICP could be appreciated ironically, but there’s enough layers here to make an onion dip jealous. The fact that each member has no less than nine nicknames listed on their Wikipedia, all of them clearly based on some sort of unimaginable backstory. (Shaggy’s best were “Ham’d Burglah” and “Guy Gorfey,” while Violent J is also known as “Moon Glorious,” “Golden Jelly,” “Fats Pepper,” and “Bullet.” What lives these gentlemen must lead.)

College Humor has a series of videos called “If Google Was A Guy,” and I think it’s possible that ICP treats their tracks with the same sense of curiosity. They seem like the sort of people who would craft a single and shoot a gloriously expensive video just so that at some point, someone would come up and explain to them why there are rainbows. I hope someone has by now.

Bethany: Yes to everything Ben said. The science may not be there, but these guys know exactly who they are and who they’re appealing to. How else could you explain Juggalo Championship Wrestling?

The Scientist by Coldplay
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: Oh Mr ex-Paltrow. You called your song “the scientist”, because, as you clarify “Questions of science, Science and progress, Do not speak as loud as my heart” . Oh good. I’ve got the whiny emo kid over here highjacking my science class. I mean, it’s like I asked for an essay on the cardiovascular system and you wrote me an essay on your broken heart. Fantastic.

This is going to be a long semester.

Ben: I’m the Coldplay stan of this pairing, but I was the one who suggested this song, since this really is indefensible. If we’d spoken up at the time, we might have been spared a number of things, including “conscious uncoupling” and the snoring mess that is A Head Full of Dreams.

“The Scientist” is a deeply emotive song, and its music video is cool as hell, but its a lyrical travesty from beginning to end. The words are structured in a way that no human has ever attempted to use as normal communication, and it makes a vague feint at rhyming that it never really succeeds at – only one word is rhymed throughout the song, and the words “heart” and “apart” are brazenly matched with “are,” and “hard.” Chris Martin is trying to rhyme mostly through a lack of elocution – which probably helps in the video, since he has to sing the song backwards, and in slow motion. You don’t want too many consonants cluttering that up.

Bethany: That is a far deeper explanation than I expected. I thought it was just one of those “I’m versatile! I can write deep and whiny songs about heartbreak from many angles! See, this one is even called the Scientist! I have a PhD in matters of the heart!”

Ben: “I have a PhD in matters of the heart” is actually my Tinder profile.

White Coats by New Model Army
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: This song might be anti-science, but I can’t really tell.  Who are these men in white coats? Doctors? Scientists? Psychiatric professionals? What’s going on here?  Is this an anti-nuclear war song?  I mean, at least System of a Down had a clear thesis statement.

Ben: I can’t parse it either, and I’m not going to try. I was much too distracted by the music video, which is such a wonder of awfulness it seems impossible that it exists at all. At first I assumed that my ears were deceiving me, and despite the late-80’s sound to the song, it was a late-70’s tune, and the music video was from a pre-MTV time when bands made music videos just to have something to stick at the end of their concert VHS tapes.

But no, “White Coats” is from 1989, which may not necessarily be a peak year in music video creativity, was at least a decade into music video competence. And yet this video looks like it was shot on a borrowed video recorder by Brian, their untrustworthy roadie. Though they clearly spent a fair amount of the studio’s money on the affair, since at several points they cut to poorly executed helicopter shots of the band standing atop impressive cliff faces. I just hope they didn’t make Brian fly the helicopter, too.

Fancy by Iggy Azalea
Nominated Line: “I can hold you down, like I’m giving lessons in physics”

Bethany: Is it just me or did Iggy Azalea have one of the fastest “hey she’s cool!” to “hey she’s awful!” turns in the history of pop? I don’t really keep up with these things so much, but it gave even me whiplash.

Anyway, this video always gets some credit from me because it recreates the entire movie “Clueless”, which is actually a pretty cool concept for a video. The line “I can hold you down like I’m giving lessons in physics” however, not so much.

I mean, most physics courses do teach you something about gravity, which holds you down. But quite frankly, that works whether or not you know why, and the physics lesson itself rarely involves holding anyone down. Maybe they do things differently in Australia.

Ben: I have long been a defender of pop stars who the internet piles onto, as things get heinous so quickly, and I stick with them as long as I can (I’m sorry I had to leave you behind, Macklemore. The breakers got too big). I feel for Iggy, who somehow had a video break this month where her fiancé proudly announced that he’d cheated on her with multiple women, including a 19-year-old, and she still engendered shockingly little sympathy. The world is a callous place.

The “talentless” Azalea, who had two songs tied for number one in the summer of 2014, was introduced to us through this peppy track and its note-perfect recreation of Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (Heckerling later noted “it looks like they had more money for the video than I did the movie”).

I’m trying to come up with a defense of the line, and all I can manage is that Azalea is 5’10”, which is probably at least half a head taller than anyone she’s trying to match up against. As Archimedes would probably note, give me a place to stand and a long enough Azalea, and I can move the earth.

Bethany: By the way, I will admit I spent most of that video trying to read what’s on the white board behind her. It’s a pretty amusing list of the best all time rappers. I would have given her full credit on the physics line if it had instead been something like this:

Insert your musician of choice for Elvis, of course.

Supercollider by Fountains of Wayne
Nominated Line: whole song

Ben: I’ve somehow gotten ahead of Bethany on this one, but since I know absolutely nothing about supercolliders, or even regular colliders, I better wait for her to catch up.

Bethany: Huh, how’d I let that happen. Anyway, this whole song reminds me of this:

The use of the word “supercollider” in this song is clearly just meant to represent something vaguely spacey/sciencey, and it pretty much fails. The repeated line “Out of the blackness/Into the great big sky/Supercollider/Shooting inside your mind”.

A Supercollider actually has two technical meanings: either a programming language or a high velocity particle accelerator. While technically the latter group does shoot particles, they don’t shoot them in to the sky, nor do they shoot them in your mind. They actually shoot them in highly controlled environments in order to study their properties more closely . I mean, they could mean that they are testing their assumptions one at a time while psychologically controlling for their biases….but with lines like “Gather round the gas tower/don’t it kind of look like a bong”….I’m doubting they put that much thought in to it. I’m guessing they thought it was a little more involved in rockets or something.

Ben: My knowledge of supercolliders comes entirely from movies, where characters wander into scientific experiments and develop superpowers that are extraordinary and deadly, and also not explicitly licensed to DC or Marvel. I’m assuming that the songwriting process for this included a lot of bong hits and the viewing of some mid-90’s Michael Crichton-aping science fiction. Sounds like a good time, did not at all make for a good song.

Want part 2? Read it here.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey everybody, how’s your week been? We’re back this week with more terrible and gory “science” songs.  While Part 1 focused mostly on muppet fighting pits, part 2 takes some interesting twisting in to gravity, terminal velocity, digits of pi, and Jason Deruuuuuuuuuuulo.

(What A) Wonderful World by Sam Cooke
Nominated Line: Whole Song

Bethany: You would think this song would annoy me, but I’m still putting it above Jimmy Buffett from last week. This was actually Ben’s irritated nomination, so I’m going to let him take the first shot.

Ben: I can’t help myself, whenever I see this song title, I mentally start singing the superior Louis Armstrong song by the same title. I have to reorient myself to remember just which song we’re talking about.

First off, let’s be fair and admit the resume of Sam Cooke is unimpeachable. Even this nothing of a song has all the casual soulfulness of all of Cooke’s work. But, dear God, is it banal as all heaven. The message is supposed to be, “I may not know anything else, but at least I know that I love you,” but it fails even in that simplicity of thought. The bridge in the song claims “Now, I don’t claim to be an A student, but I’m trying to be. For maybe by being an A student, baby, I can win your love for me.” This is a pipe dream, Sam. The only fact you’ve managed to correctly assess in this song is that one and one is two, and that’s not going to take you very far. You’re a grown man.

Even the rhyming structure sounds like something thrown together by someone who just found out what a poem is. The only words he successfully manages to rhyme are “you” and “too,” which doesn’t really count. The other verses only manage one rhyme, the supremely unsatisfying “don’t know much about the French I took, don’t know much about a science book.” I don’t know which one of those awkward lines was the one forced in to create the rhyme, but neither one does you any credit.

Bethany: There is something extra irritating about a person mangling science in order to come up with a banal rhyme. Kinda like a kid advocating to write an essay in lieu of their algebra final, then producing “C” work.

Strychnine by The Sonics
Nominated Line: Some folks like water, some folks like wine, but I like the taste of straight strychnine.

Bethany: This song is some sort of terrible reverse PSA. It’s not just one line advocating for eating strychnine, it appears to be MULTIPLE lines advocating for strychnine consumption. Is this a good idea? Well, per the CDC: “Strychnine is a strong poison; only a small amount is needed to produce severe effects in people. Strychnine poisoning can cause extremely serious adverse health effects, including death.”

So no.

I’d stick with wine, and send someone over to the Sonics house for a wellness check.

Ben: There’s a real misunderstanding of how poison works in this song: “wine is red, poison is blue” – no, guys, that’s not how it works. While I’m pleased you’re not just downing Windex and antifreeze, poisons are generally not color-coded, unless you’re playing a Dungeons and Dragons game on a Windows 98 operating system.

On the flip side, we don’t need to run a wellness check on the Sonics. This song came out a full 52 years ago, and yet all five members of the Sonics are alive, recording albums, and touring. Maybe they know something we don’t.

Bethany: Well I’m glad they’re okay. I did a quick Google search to see if their bad advice had gotten them in any legal trouble over the years, and they appear to be okay on that front as well.

Swan Dive by Ani Difranco
Nominated Line: “Gravity is nothing to me, moving at the speed of sound”

Bethany: You may remember my love of Ani Difranco from Week 1 when Ben brought up a concert of hers I missed back in high school due to my tyrannical and unfair parents. I still love Ani, and Swan Dive is a great reason why. Beautiful song with just enough discordance to reflect the angst of the lyrics.

That being said, this lyric is just wrong. Things that move at the speed of sound are still subject to gravity. DON’T IGNORE GRAVITY ANI THAT WILL END BADLY. We are working on jets that go five times the speed of sound, and they still have to worry about gravity. It’s a force to be reckoned with. I mean, it lacks the cache of  the electromagnetic forces, strong force or weak force, but I still wouldn’t mess with it.

Ben: You’d think that in a song called “Swan Dive,” Miss Difranco would have a greater respect for what kind of effect gravity has. She mentions that she’s just going to “get her feet wet, until I drown.” Well, of course you are, Ani, on a swan dive you enter headfirst.

Your feet are going to be the last thing to get wet.

Ani mentions that she’s diving into “shark-infested waters,” as if that’s going to be the thing that kills her. You’re traveling at the speed of sound towards a body of water, which is almost-but-not-quite impossible. Terminal velocity for a human is 118 mph, while the speed of sound is several times higher, at 767 mph. However, mankind has broken the sound barrier in free fall before. You might remember this:

However, that man was wearing a spacesuit and had a parachute. Even so, there were quite a few things that could have gone wrong midway, such as all of his blood boiling in his body.

Even if Miss DiFranco were to make it to the water on her ill-advised swan dive, things would be unlikely to go well for her afterwards.

Bethany: In her defense, a swan dive only starts with your hands if you’re a human calling something a swan dive. An actual swan dive as done by swans involves the feet being wet already.

Also, I think I’ve found the perfect solution for Ani’s scientific misunderstanding here AND a collaborator for her next album….these guys.

Pi by Kate Bush
Nominated Line: the part where she gets the digits of pi wrong

Bethany: Ugh. Kate Bush. Really. You would think I couldn’t hate a song that contained 150 digits of pi. But. They. Are. WRONG.

Check it out:

Kate Bush (first verse)	3.141592653589793238462643383279
Real pi	3.141592653589793238462643383279
Kate Bush (second verse)	5028841971693993751058231974944592307816406286208(…)821480865132
Real pi	502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825 8253421170679821480865132
Kate Bush	8230664709384460955058223
Real pi	8230664709384460955058223

My only conclusion is that she had a mild stroke in the second verse and just skipped those extra digits. Why would you do this Kate? You had to know we’d check.

Ben: Oh, cripes, this song is nine-and-a-half minutes long? I don’t have this kind of time, Kate. I can just go look pi up on my phone, provided no one’s messed with the Wikipedia that day.

This is par for the course for Kate Bush, who thrives on gibberish, in case you’ve never see the lyrics to “50 Words For Snow.” I don’t know what Kate’s end game is, but it’s possible she’s just from another universe entirely. One that I don’t want to visit.

Bethany:  Her end game may be more well thought out than we’re giving her credit for, especially since her gaff here got her a whole mathematical conjecture named after her. The Kate Bush conjecture now reads: “Kate could have sung any finite sequence of digits and it would exist somewhere in the decimal expansion of Pi.”

I feel defeated.

Algebra by Jason Derulo
Nominated Line: “I got more problems than an algebra equation, they say become a doctor, I don’t have the patience.”

Bethany: Hi Jason, can we talk? About your problems here….for algebra, you can solve as many problems (or for as many variables) as you have equations. So if Jay-Z has 99 problems, he’s going to need 99 equations to solve them. You have one equation, and therefore only have one problem. Everything else is pretty unsolvable unless you call in reinforcements.

Ben: I flinched when I clicked the link to listen to the song, because I knew it would start with Derulo introducing himself, and of course, there it was. “Jason De-Rule-Ooooooooo!” Jason, this is a song on your own album. No one is confused about who is singing this song.

You have a problem with the first line, but my issue was with the second. Jason, stop fooling yourself, no one wants you to become a doctor. Everyone is quite certain that would be disastrous. Can you imagine a sentence scarier than, “excuse me, sir, Dr. Derulo will see you now?” I’d rather be operated on by Clive Owen at the Knick. Even if DeVry University gave you an honorary doctorate that they just emailed to you, I’d still sign the online petition protesting it.

Bethany: And there you have it folks! Now you may think we’ve hit the bottom, but we haven’t quite yet. You see, these 10 songs were all wrong, but at least they were coherently wrong. Next week we take on 10 songs that hit that special balance known as “not even wrong”.  Stay tuned.

Looking for songs that aren’t even wrong? Read that here!

Hello again folks! Welcome to our ongoing journey to catalog the best, the worst, and the most blase science references in all of music.  We started out with ten good science references (Part 1 and Part 2 here), and now we’re working on those songs that get a rating of “decidedly mediocre”. We did the first 5 here, and now we’re moving on to finish off the list. Ready? Fantastic! Let’s get started:

Scientist by Dandy Warhols
Nominated line: whole song

Bethany: Wow, when Ben nominated this song, he mentioned there was not much too it. Having now listened to it and reviewed the lyrics….he’s completely right. This song keeps seeming like it will ramp up in a clever reference or two, but it pretty much stops at “we’ve got to live on science alone” and some grunting.  Also, at the 6 second mark the girl in the video drinks something directly out of a beaker, and that’s just not safe. I’m starting to doubt her credentials.

Ben: I also have real questions about her decision to avoid wearing safety goggles and spend her lab hours lounging on a uncomfortable-looking couch licking her lips at the camera. How did she ever find the time to finish her graduate degree? Her work ethic seems questionable, and her lab seems to exist solely of two beakers and a microscope. Maybe it’s a lack of funding.

I do like the Dandy Warhols, but this is a blah nothing of a song and a blah nothing of a music video, so it gets the blah nothing of a review it deserves.

Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen
Nominated line: “Thunderbolts and lightning very very frightening Galileo Galileo Galileo” (3:17 mark)

Bethany: Okay, there’s a strong argument to be made that this song should never appear on any list that includes the words “meh” or “mediocre”. I mean, it’s a great song and it was awesome in Wayne’s World. I get that. I really do. HOWEVER….this science reference is pretty lame.  While Galileo is an awesome historical scientific figure and his contributions to science are many, he does not appear to have done any particular work on thunderbolts, lightening, things that were very very frightening or Figaro.

Scratch that: Galileo did champion heliocentrism, which was very very frightening to some. I also like to hold out hope that there’s something very frightening on one of Jupiter’s moons, which he also discovered.

Ben: The problem with discussing “Bohemian Rhapsody” is that it’s impossible to talk about for more than two minutes without someone jumping in with a “GALILEO! [distant voice] galileo! GALILEO! [even more distant voice] galileo!” and then someone else coming in with “GALILEO FIGARO!” and all of a sudden it’s a contest to prove that you can sing all the lyrics all the way up until the end and I’ve lost nine minutes of my life and gotten kicked out of Arby’s.

I appreciate that Galileo discovered Jupiter’s moons, since most of our best moons are up there.

Current Moon ranks:
1. Titan, orbiting Jupiter. It’s massive, has weather, and might be a second earth.
2. Europa, orbiting Jupiter, which has a vast frozen ocean underneath.
2. Our moon, but the way poets talk about it.
3. Charon, orbiting Pluto. The best moon an ex-planet could ever have. At least they have each other.
4. Io, orbiting Jupiter, which has hundreds of active volcanoes.
5. Our moon, but the way Buzz Aldrin thinks about it.
6. Triton, orbiting Neptune. Also gigantic, and deserves to be a planet. Got a raw deal by orbiting Neptune.
7. Our moon, but the way Dean Martin thinks about it.
8. Mimas, the moon that looks like the Death Star.
9. The brief stretch we thought the Death Star was a small moon.
10. A harvest moon.
57. Phobos, orbiting Mars. If we ever fly to Mars, we’ll probably land on it first. Has no other interesting qualities of any kind.
314. Supermoon. Supposed to be impressive, but always disappointing. The Fourth-of-July parade of moons.

Bethany: So I promised up front I was going to get a little bored and space out with the meh list….BUT NOW WE’RE RANKING MOONS AND I WANT BACK IN!!! Not only am I angry with myself for not doing this before Ben did, but now I’m in “scrambling for an angle” mode. The first thing I can think of is the best moon gifs I could find on short notice:

1. 4 of Jupiter’s moons, including Callisto and Ganymede that are feeling a little put out at Ben right now:                          
2. Jupiter and Io, just hanging out being cute: 
3. Our moon rotating and showing us it’s dark side and reminding me we left Pink Floyd off this list by accident: 
4. This one, that shows moon gravity and why I should stick to earth:               

Okay, I feel better now.

Race For the Prize by The Flaming Lips
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: So this song is a thoughtful meditation on scientist engaged in a race for the good of all mankind. It’s beautiful, inspiring, and really dramatizes and humanizes scientists and their struggle. So what’s my problem?

I don’t know what it’s about.

Seriously. Watch the video. There are guys running with electrodes attached and men in raincoats with tubas, but no explanation. There’s a suggestion they’re looking for a cure, but for what? Are we supposed to believe this is just how everyday scientist operate? Because it’s really not. Who are these guys? This is like having a friend tell you an awesome story about a run in with a celebrity, only to tell you that they can’t actually legally name the celebrity.  NO TELL ME THE WHOLE THING OR DON’T TELL ME THE STORY.

Ben: I like that the scientists chose to have their subject run outside, attached to a number of diodes, while they pursued him on foot wearing full-body chemical suits, but no facial protection of any kind. It’s guerrilla science. Sure, their data is unusable and they used up all their grant money, but THEY COULD FEEL THE SCIENCE IN THEIR HAIR AS THEY RAN.

I have no idea what this song means, either, but I find it somehow moving anyway. I don’t know how Wayne Coyne’s voice always does this to me. Also, who gave Wayne Coyne a trumpet for this video? Did Wayne Coyne also not know what to do with his hands? Is this how we eventually ended up here?

You stay you, Wayne.

Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: This is another song I hate to criticize because it got used well in a movie I love, but my art compels me. This is not a song about science. This is a song about the impact developing technology has on the experience of day to day life. While that’s cool and all, it’s really more a philosophical and ethical issue than a science issue. I really hate it when people try to use the two interchangeably. That’s physics for poets level crap right there. To get to the pantheon, this song would have to actually cite some of the technology used. I mean, the only advancement specifically called out is the VCR? Come on, you can do better than that. Granted not much rhymes with “farnovision“, but you could have worked something in.

Ben: Well, I might have taken some shots at this song earlier, but your intro got me into an entirely different moves. I can’t take shots at “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Not today…

This song, permanently famous for its portentous place in MTV history, is a catchy bit of pop made by a producer who felt the winds of change coming long before they actually did. It’s so perfect as a metaphor for what happened to pop music in the following decades that it seems impossible that it really existed in its real time and place, and wasn’t written snidely after the fact as a commentary on the effects of the need for pretty faces and flashy visuals.

That said, Bethany is right. There’s no science here, unless the “supernova scene” is something much more impressive than what I imagine it to be. It’s only tangentially connected to the subject at hand, and as such, it only gets partial credit.

Bethany: Wait, what if that Supernova Scene involves a Champagne Supernova?

Also, pedants note: The line “Supernova Scene” was not in the original, but rather in the POTUSA cover.

Space Oddity by David Bowie
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: Since I’m yet again complaining about a great song that simply doesn’t have enough “science” for me, I thought I’d point out that I know how ridiculous I sound:

That’s me and this song. I like you David Bowie, but you call your ship a tin can. No comment on the technological marvel that got you 100,000 miles away from earth? Your only comment on your view of earth is “it’s blue”? Really? And you’re meditating on your death and your love for your wife but not one word on what possible mechanical failure precipitated all these thoughts?

I really don’t understand why anything with even the briefest of references to something vaguely scienc-ey gets called a science song. I mean, we don’t cite “Charge of the Light Brigade” as a primer on international relations, so lets just all admit “Space Oddity” has very little to do with science.

Then again, it was pretty darn awesome when Chris Hadfield took this song up a notch with his recording of this on the International Space Station….so I’m a little torn.

Ben:  First off, let’s give a quick doff of the cap to longtime Earth resident and almost certain alien, David Bowie, who is no longer with us and has likely returned to his home world.

Second, ALLOW ME TO CORRECT YOUR SCIENCE, BETHANY. During the period of space travel that Bowie was singing about, the walls of the Saturn rockets were basically made of reinforced aluminum foil. His comparison to a tin can is apt both in visual and in practice – an aluminum soda can’s experior is about .1 mm thick, parts of the Saturn shuttles were a mere .3 mm thick. Our early astronauts really were barely more than a hairsbreadth away from outer space.

Not to mention, the Earth does look awfully blue when seen from space. And, should I ever find myself in a situation where my spaceship tumbles endlessly away from earth to my certain death, I should be pleased if my last thoughts were with those I love rather than whatever cataclysmic event had caused my death. There’s no poetry in “Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles, I’m feeling very still, and it looks like an oxygen tank has exploded and I’ve lost control of my thrusters, the hull is breached and the cabin is decompressing, I’m certain to die of oxygen loss in just a few minutes now.” At least not without a good backbeat to it.

Putting this one in the anti-science camp is the fact that it sprang from Bowie going to see 2001: A Space Odyssey “several times, stoned out of my gourd.” So maybe let’s call this one a draw.

Bethany:  You’ve kind of sold me. I feel like this is one of those songs that if I’d put it on the good list I’d regret it, and now it’s on this list and I regret it. Like many a straight man in the 70s, Bowie has left me with confused feelings of uncertainty where I’ve never had them before. I’ll give him an A-, but if any of his friends try to pass in similar work they’ll have a C so fast it’ll make their head spin.

Ben: That about wraps us up for the week. It’s downhill from here, right, Bethany?

Bethany: Oh yes.

Want to read our list of bad songs? We start that here.