Well hello there! After spending two weeks and 3000 words praising various songs for getting science right (Part 1 here and Part 2 here), we’re now moving a step down the ladder to the decidedly mediocre. These are the songs that reference science and aren’t really wrong, but aren’t overly inspiring or interesting either.  While some of these are great songs, just know that through most of this my face resembles a bored professor teaching general science requirements to liberal arts major freshmen who didn’t figure out how to test out. For those of you never in that situation, it’s just an inner scream that looks like this:

The Math by Hilary Duff
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: Despite the promising title, this is a song that clearly exists because one of Hilary Duff’s songwriters had a crush on a guy who was smarter than her. She tries to explain love to him in terms of mathematics, but it’s the kind of math references anyone who’s passed 3rd grade would understand. Addition. Subtraction. Equal signs. THIS ISN’T GOING TO WORK HILARY. We math geeks love our references, but we like them at a level that requires more than a primary school education.

You can still turn this around though….do a follow up that references how much you’ve learned then say things like “You say it’s time to go, but with convolution time doesn’t matter”. That’ll get ’em.

Barring that, I can only say this: Why can’t you be more like that nice Josh Ritter fellow Ms Duff?

Ben: Bethany referenced Duff’s songwriters in her paragraph, which means I have to do the research into the recording of this Hilary Duff album, which was not the sort of thing I thought I signed up for.

A short history: “The Math” was recorded for the release of Hilary Duff’s first real pop album, the recording of which sounds like the sort of well-paying migraine you sign up for when you become a pop producer. Apparently, at the launch of this process, Duff was a Disney TV star who decided she wanted to become a singer because she saw pop musicians warming up before a show and it “looked fun.” A Disney executive signed her, had her start voice lessons, and launched a multi-million dollar recording session. Somewhere out there, Robert Johnson’s soul just moaned in eternal torment.

Recording was immediately troubled because Duff was “listening to a lot of Destiny’s Child at the time” (weren’t we all), so the songs had an “urban style” to them that apparently “didn’t strike a chord,” according to one of the producers. From what we know of Duff’s artistic range, I assume this is a breathtakingly dramatic understatement.

At this point, her producer asked her “what kind of music she would like to do,” which is not normally the sort of conversation one has halfway through a recording process. She mentioned that growing up, she’d “listened to a lot of rock music,” (I genuinely do not want to know who she means) and liked songs that had “a little bit more guitar in it.”

Enter Kara DioGuardi – yes, that Kara DioGuardi! Onetime American Idol judge/reluctant bikini model Kara DioGuardi! – who had written demos for a number of songs, including future Duff singles “Come Clean” and “Little Voice.” Duff recorded these as demos, and they were sent to the studio, along with “The Math,” which was not sung by Duff at all but by prolific songwriter Lauren Christy. The studio loved all three songs and the new direction, and Duff was forced to add all three to her new record.

Forced? Yes, evidently, Duff feels the same way about “The Math” that the rest of us do, calling it “her biggest mistake,” which is very strong language for someone who dated both Joel Madden and Aaron Carter. Of course, when you listen to the pop-guitar buzz and word vomit that makes up “The Math,” one understands exactly where she’s coming from.

Also, for our younger reader, to “star 69” someone meant to type that exact sequence into your phone’s touchtone pad, which would then make the landline you were on call the last person who had called you back. What a weird, old-timey thing to do! Anyway, it’s not sordid or anything. Hilary kept it clean.

Bethany: Whoa. I think you put more effort in to that part than went in to the entire song to begin with. Good show.

Rest my Chemistry by Interpol
Nominated Line: “I’m going to rest my chemistry”

Bethany: Okay, Ben’s going to have to explain this one to me. This song uses the word “chemistry” ten times and doesn’t say anything about the subject. In my world, that’s just name dropping.

Ben: As best I can tell, to “rest my chemistry” means to “not take any cocaine, at least right at the moment.” It’s like when celebrities go to rehab for “exhaustion.”

As Interpol songs go, this is fine, but it carries no weight next to, say, “Evil,” their hook-laden hit with the bizarre puppetry music video. Frankly, putting “Rest My Chemistry” in this group feels right – it’s a tune with a vague acknowledgement of the chemical makeup of the world around us, but without any actual, you know, science.

Bethany: Glad we’re on the same page here. B- to Interpol because I just don’t want to see them again next semester.

Ben: Boy, if retaking the course comes into consideration, that’s going to dramatically affect the scores the groups we’re covering in the sections to come. Unless the dean just happens to find some contraband in Thomas Dolby’s locker, of course…

She’s Electric by Oasis
Nominated line: “She’s electric, can I be electric too?”

Bethany: Just so we all know I can criticize things I love, let’s talk about this song. Noel repeats over and over how electric this girl he likes is. This is all well and good, but then he starts wanting to be electric too. This clearly goes against all electrical safety precautions, where the goal is to not electrocute yourself along with the person you’re trying to help. It’s like he knows how it works, but like a 12 year old in his first hands on lab wants to do the exact wrong thing with the information.

On the other hand, this could be turned around with the right visuals. This could totally work in concert:

Except make it  more British-ey.

Ben: I don’t know what that visual is, but I found the perfect British person to design it.

He’s already interested in lightbulbs!

“She’s Electric” is full of bad ideas. This woman has a sister, and “God only knows how he missed her.” It seems exceptionally unwise to get involved in a relationship where you wish you’d had a go at her sister, but now it’s too late. What’s more, he doesn’t get along with her brother, who quite wisely doesn’t trust Noel, since he also has taken a fancy to their mother. Meanwhile, the girl in question is pregnant with someone else’s child, which wouldn’t be outrageously concerning except that he only mentions it in conjunction with the fact that she has a lot of cousins, making an uncomfortable inference about the perhaps-too-close relationships that hold this familial group together.

Most importantly, he’s not showing proper electrical safety, and that’s the most major concern. Noel, you know full well what’s going to happen if you try to end up “electric too.”

*

*Note: possibly not 100% scientifically accurate.

Noel, take my advice. Get out of there. She’s no good for you. This is a nightmare waiting to happen. But if you must, handle her carefully, and try to move her away from any electric current with a broom, like this:

Readers, if only we were all so wise.

Bethany: Ben, I see a future for you in gif-driven public safety educational videos. It’s a calling.

Ben: I probably can’t make a career out of it, but I’ll change my twitter bio anyway.

Man on the Moon by R.E.M.
Nominated line: “Newton got beamed by the apple good”

Bethany: This line has always bothered me. Why is it there? It’s not interesting, it’s not inspired, it’s a scientific reference only in the loosest sense of the term. Isn’t this a song about Andy Kaufman? Why are we talking about Newton and apples? The story about how he discovered gravity is really famous and possibly apocryphal, but everyone knows this. What does it teach us? We get a complete biography of Kaufman in under 5 minutes and then a 5 second muttering about Newton and apples? Michael Stipe, you disappoint.

Ben: Boy, you were grouchy on this one. Until I fixed it, you’d managed to both get the name of the song wrong and misspell “R.E.M.” That’s some uncharacteristic negligence. Looks like it’s up to me to defend our favorite Georgian college-rock band.

It’s tough to make too much out of this one. “Man On The Moon” was the last song recorded for R.E.M.’s masterwork album Automatic For The People, and the lyrics of it came at the very last minute. The entire album had been finished and was to be sent for mastering the next morning.  They had recorded music for “Man On The Moon,” but the song was still without vocals, or indeed, lyrics. Michael Stipe, stymied by writer’s block for weeks, walked around the block, listening to the track, and decided to write the lyrics as a song about Andy Kaufman. The lyrics were written and the vocals recorded only a few hours later.

Or, at least, that’s what Michael Stipe says. Stipe, like Kaufman, was prone to inventing stories as a form of self-glorification, and enjoyed playing fast and loose with the truth. Much like Newton’s possible mythical apple, we will never know the veracity of the story.

In fact, that’s most likely the reference Stipe is making here: Newton’s apple, Moses bringing forth water from his stick, Cleopatra being bitten by an asp – are these historical events or falsehoods accepted as realities? Stipe even questions Kaufman’s own death – “here’s a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s” – a nod to how Kaufman’s propensity for taking a joke too far led to his fans never being quite able to accept that he was dead.

As usual, R.E.M.’s penchant to meander along line between cleverness and ambiguity is well covered over by their ear for melody, since this is a hall of fame pop song no matter how well you understand the lyrics. That baseline is an all-timer.

Bethany: Realizing I misspelled R.E.M. led to the sub-realization that their band name is a better scientific reference than this line.  Also, here’s the wrestling match from line two:

She Blinded Me With Science by Thomas Dolby
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: Okay, if you thought I was grouchy about R.E.M., it’s nothing compared to my feelings about this Dolby song. Let me say this once, very clearly, so there’s no misunderstanding: THIS. IS. NOT. A. SCIENCE. SONG.

It’s not. It’s a high school kid reading his course schedule. It’s not fit to graduate, let alone be considered an anthem. This song is like a singer yelling “WHAT’S UP INSERT RELEVANT CITY NAME HERE” at a concert. There are subjects named, but no actual science….and yet because it says SCIENCE loudly and over and over, somehow it’s become part of the pantheon. Are we nerds so bad off that we will accept this kind of thing? Guys, we have to expect better than this. We’re worth it.

Ben: I was utterly unfamiliar with Mr. Dolby and his scientific affectations, and so watching the music video for this song was a bit of a rude awakening. This song is everything I dislike about pop music in the 80’s, from the off-puttingly banal Mad Lib lyricism, to the bewildering shouts of British television science enthusiast Magnus Pike, to (above all) the brain-curdling synth track, with its entirely electric violin sound fooling no one (Dolby at one point plays an actual violin in the video, and later rubs a bow across an actress halfheartedly painted to look like a violin. In neither action is he convincing).

What’s odd is that despite the song’s utter ineptitude at expressing coherent scientific thought, Thomas Dolby’s resume is somewhat reasonably accomplished. He’s an accomplished session musician, been the musical director at the TED Conference since 2001, and is now a professor of the arts at Johns Hopkins. However, it seems that rather than his hit single being the culmination of a lifetime understanding of science, his odd one-hit wonder led him to become the poster boy for science and music, and respectability followed.

The music video for this song – also featuring the truly bizarre Magnus Pike – is a mashup of every bit of awful 80’s-ness: an unappealing frontman in an unappealing outfit, frantic camera zooms, an attractive woman wearing glasses in “sexy scientist” vibe, a low angle shot of just a woman’s legs, the unjustified used of children dressed up as adults, and a film reference (the text slates seen in silent films) used with hammering clumsiness. The peak moment of this is one of the video’s final slates:

Nerds of the world: you do not want this song representing you.

In my perusal of Mr. Dolby’s Wikipedia, I also found this:

The only thing less surprising to me was discovering that this song went to number one in Canada. Stop playing into our conceptions of you, Canucks!

That’s all I’ve got this week. Bethany?

Bethany: Until next week and Part 2, I’ll just be here doing my nails.

Part 2 is up, read it here!

This is Part 2 of our piece on “Ten Songs That Get Science Right”. Missed Part 1? Read it here.

“Champagne Supernova” by Oasis
Nominated Line: “Like a Champagne Supernova in the sky”

Bethany: I loved this song in high school. In fact I loved this whole band, and even in 2016 two out of the last three concerts I’ve been to are Noel Gallagher concerts. Conflict of interest aside, that’s not why this made the list. It made the list because it’s the only song I know of that actually summoned the scientific phenomena it referenced in to existence….or at least got something really cool named after it. Basically, when this song was released in 1996, the term Champagne Supernova had no real astronomical meaning. That changed in 2006, when researchers discovered a supernova that exceeded the Chandrasekhar limit and decided that “extreme explosions that offer new insight into the inner workings of supernovae are an obvious cause for celebration”. Ergo, they dubbed it a “champagne supernova”. And yes, they clarified they did know the song and it was not a coincidental naming.

Can’t wait to see what a Wonderwall turns out to be.

Ben: Donald Trump is building it right now.

As someone who just aggressively defended my BNL fandom, I’m not going to sit idly by and let you feel exposed by expressing your love of Oasis and one of the Gallaghers, though I coudn’t remember which one was the good one, so I had to Google it.

I’m pretty sure I disagree with this  – I like Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds more than I like Beady Eye – but I’d be much more interested in the opinions of my more versed colleague.

Perhaps* I am biased, but I think 90’s alternative rock has aged much better than most genres, and Oasis has aged as well as anyone. Both “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova” are still magnificent recordings, and both deserve to have pieces of scientific wonder named after them into time immemorial, even though spending more than an hour or two in either brother’s presence seems like a fate nigh unto death.

*unquestionably

Bethany: You don’t have to defend me. My love for somewhat whiny British men with livers of steel is not a thing I’m ashamed of. Also, my google says this:

C₁₁ H₁₇ N₂ O₂ S Na by Anthrax
Nominated Line: Song Title

Bethany: Do I even have to explain my love for this? It’s a chemical formula. Who puts a chemical formula for their song title? The same guy who named his bio “The Story of That Guy From Anthrax” that’s who. Anyway, that’s the real formula for sodium pentathol aka “truth serum” and the whole song is about wishing you could force someone to tell the truth. No further science references at all, just a chemical formula you have to google.  While in reality sodium pentathol probably doesn‘t work that well, I’ll let that slide as poetic license.

Ben: Well, this led me down a whole rabbit hole of the history of sodium pentathol and its use in police confessions, and eventually to the bizarre case of Sybil Dorsett, a fascinating story that I will never be able to work into a conversation as long as I live.

I’m no particular fan of thrash metal in any context, though Anthrax is one of the better examples of the genre, and I appreciate the cleanliness of the recording rather than hiding a lack of musicianship behind fuzz. The thing I like the most about the song is that it was recorded in 1993 – therefore, Googling or even Altavista-ing the song title was out of the question. You had to know someone else who knew what it meant, or go to an actual library. Anthrax: supporting libraries!

Well, they always did seem like a studious lot.

“Stuck To You” by Josh Ritter
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: I will admit, I had never heard this song before Ben put it on the list. Color me ashamed. This is every pedantic nerds dream song, wherein a man takes common love song cliches and corrects them with more scientifically accurate answers.  It’s a beautiful thing, and a little more elaborate than just declaring someone your statistically significant other.

Ben: I found this one on a hunt for “science songs,” and while I’d listened to a fair bit of Josh Ritter before, I’d never stumbled across this one. It’s a neat, concise statement that’s both tongue-in-cheek and mournful, like a lot of folk songs used to be. I wish more artists had this sort of song in their quiver.

Bethany: Especially once we get to the next section, we’re going to look back at this song wistfully.  Spoiler alert: I will definitely use the line “Why couldn’t you be more like that nice Josh Ritter fellow Ms Duff” at some point.

“The Elements” by Tom Lehrer
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: How can we do a “best of” list and not include the Elements Song? I mean, I spent a whole day at my grandfather’s house one summer attempting to memorize this in the days before DVR and easy rewind. I think I broke his VHS, and he made me watch Pirates of Penzance as penance.  Anyway, this was written in 1959 and it falls 16 elements short of today’s periodic table….but it’s still a great song. Damn catchy too.

Ben: My dad and I used to listen to old comedy records together in our living room, which is a very old-fashioned thing for someone who is technically considered a Millennial to say. One of the ones we played most frequently was An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, which contains such ditties as “Poisoning Pigeons In the Park,” “The Masochism Tango,” and also “The Elements,” which I saw no less than three different math majors perform at talent shows while in college. Singing all the words to this song aloud is the nerd equivalent of peacocking. In fact, here’s Daniel Radcliffe doing it right now!

Whoops, ended up on a whole celebrities-rapping-on-talk-shows YouTube jag. Got distracted there for a minute.

“Girl You Have No Faith In Medicine” by White Stripes
Nominated Line: whole song

Bethany: I’m not entirely sure about this song, but I think I like it. It appears to be a song about placebo effects, drugs that work, and people who won’t take drugs that are too familiar because they need something different. I put it on repeat for an hour to see if I ended up feeling differently, and I didn’t. I think this is an anti-alternative medicine theme song. Probably.

Ben: Like all White Stripes songs, your mileage is going to vary considerably depending on whether what Jack White does is your jam or not. I dig the White Stripes, but I have no particular feelings towards this song one way or the other. I think it fits neatly into the album, because I recall liking Elephant very much, but that was a long time ago.

I was surprised that you didn’t break down the “strip the bark right off the tree and hand it this way” line (Aspirin is made from the bark of a willow tree). That seemed like your lane.

Bethany: Ben, aspirin hasn’t been made from willow bark since the late 1800s. Don’t be a hippie.

Ben: I probably shouldn’t have forged that pharmacist’s license, then. Someone’s bound to catch on eventually.

Well, that covers the good songs, so I’m expecting this to get meaner as it goes. I’m looking forward to it.

Want to go directly to the mediocre songs? Find Part 1 of that here.

For the whole series page, go here.

Well hi there! Ben and Bethany here, and we’re counting down the top science references in popular music. Last week we went over the rules and introduced Ben, so go check that out first if you’re at all confused. We’re going to start off the rankings nice and slow, beginning with 10 songs that get science right.  These are the good guys.

“Sounds of Science” by the Beastie Boys
Nominated Line: “Dropping Science like Galileo dropped the orange” (3:08 mark)

Bethany: Ooh, we’re starting off with a good one here. Can I just say I love this line? And not just because Neil Degrasse Tyson uses it in his show intro for Star Talk. No, I love it because 1. the reference is not the obvious fruit based scientist one* and 2. it’s being used accurately and describes something not quite intuitive. The reference here is to the Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment. While the details are probably apocryphal, the legend goes that Galileo went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, dropped an orange and a grape off the side, and used it to prove that gravity was not dependent on the mass of the object. Nice high school physics callback there.

*I mean, good job on the gravity thing and all Newton, but you’re getting a little cliche don’t you think?

Ben: Bethany, thanks again for having me. This is basically everything I like to do, put together in one blog post, and the best part is I get to hand off all the tricky research parts of it to someone much more qualified than me. I’m not even certain what my Google search history would look like if I were in charge of both jobs, but my first search would probably be, “what IS science?” and that’s probably a rough place to start.

“Sounds of Science” is a collection of everything I like about the Beastie Boys – showboating rapping, frenetic changes of pace, ludicrous levels of hyperbole. They make sure to brag about their prowess in… every possible context, compare themselves to Jesus Christ, then sing a Simon and Garfunkle chorus on top of a Beatles sample. They don’t lack for confidence.

As for the science, all of it seems fair – after all, “with my nose I knows and with my scopes I scope” is certainly factually accurate. I’m glad Bethany’s here, though, because I could use an explanation of what, exactly, “the radium, EMD squared” means.

Bethany: Well in addition to rhyming with “Shea Stadium”, the radium thing appears to be an incredibly clever reference. Paul’s Boutique, the album this song was on, came out in mid-1989. We can assume most of the songs on it were written or recorded in 1988, and the atomic number of radium is…..88.   Thank God they didn’t record it earlier or later, because Francium and Actinium just don’t roll of the tongue quite as well.

Based on my research, the EMD squared thing actually should have been your wheelhouse. EMD was the distribution arm of Capitol Records, their label. The squared part of course is a reference to Einstein’s mass/energy equivalence formula.

Ben: That’s a pretty classic Beastie Boys move – it’s clever, it scans, it’s a little sloppy and doesn’t quite fit – but you can’t stop and look at it too closely, because by then the boys are three verses ahead of you.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel
Nominated line: Multiple mentions but I like “children of thalidomide” (1:50 mark)

Bethany: How do you pick a reference out of a song that is literally all references?  Arbitrarily, that’s how. Actually, this isn’t totally arbitrary. Joel’s song here is an anthem covering lots of major world shaping events, and I actually really appreciated him throwing a medical reference. Thalidomide was a drug given as a sedative that was also prescribed to pregnant women for morning sickness. Despite assurances from the company that it was “completely safe” it was actually quite dangerous and resulted in children with deformities…most notably limbs that never grew and a 50% mortality rate. It’s an incredibly depressing story, but it helped push forward drug regulation and the role of the FDA in monitoring drug development. I give Joel full credit here for recognizing the importance of this historic event.

Ben: Well, this is a bummer. I hadn’t known any of this.

You wouldn’t know how dark the lyrics are from listening to the song. I’d always been aware that “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was supposed to be a protest song, but actually experiencing the song means listening to an aggressively upbeat number that is supposed to ironically contrast with the song’s content, but mostly just turns it into a catchy can-you-sing-along? contest.

As I think will become a continual theme for my responses, I highly recommend watching the entire music video, if only for the surreal moment of watching Billy Joel play an imaginary pair of bongos in front of a flaming picture of the execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém. In fact, Joel is playing imaginary bongos a fair bit during this song, as I guess that’s his go-to motion when he gets nervous. I get you, bro.

“Affirmative Action” by Foxy Brown
Nominated line: “32 grams raw, chop it in half, get 16, double it times three/We got 48, which mean a whole lot of cream/Divide the profit by four, subtract it by eight/We back to 16.” (3:34 mark)

Bethany:  Ms Brown’s lyrics have caused quite a stir, and got her voted the all time 5th worst rap line of all time by About.com. This line reminds me of one of those stupid Facebook math problems where someone makes an equation purposefully unclear then everyone argues over order of operations like that’s a thing we really all care about. However, let it never be said that I’m not willing to take sides in an argument I find stupid. Thus, here you go:

The only slight ding I give her is changing units half way through the problem, from grams to profits.

Ben: I like how you used an actual DEA photograph of heroin for the picture. Make sure everyone knows you didn’t just have that lying around.

I think Ms. Brown is significantly mistreated for her honesty in this song. This is actually not a Foxy Brown song, but a Nas song featuring remaining members of “The Firm” (AZ, Cormega, Brown), bragging about their heroin and coke-dealing exploits. The first three rappers spend their verses explaining what kind of cars they’ve purchased, except for Nas, who seems to have a bit of a death wish and spends half his verse on the reality of response killings.

It’s clear that Ms. Brown is in charge of the day-to-day business operations, and if she’s got to cut into the purity of her product in order to make a profit, that’s something she’s willing to do. She’s a business, man. And she doesn’t mind telling you how she goes about it.

Though it does seem like it would cut into any future profits to admit that you’re not giving out top-of-the-line material. This song is basically “The Big Short,” but for drug dealing.

Bethany: Reading your explanation makes me remember all the math problems I did in high school where they irritated me by adding superfluous words to “challenge” us. I DON’T CARE WHY SUZY AND JOHNNY WANT ORANGES JUST GIVE ME THE NUMBERS.

Ben: I was always the opposite, I wanted more backstory. WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN THE TRAINS PASS? IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE TRACKS? HOW MUCH TIME DO WE HAVE BEFORE THIS WHOLE THING IS BLOWN TO HELL? *furious hacking motion on imaginary keyboard* GET OUTTA THERE, JIMMY, YOU’RE NOT NOT GONNA MAKE IT!

“Why Does the Sun Shine?” by They Might Be Giants
Nominated Lyric: Whole Song

Bethany: They Might Be Giants has a whole album of kids songs called “Here Comes Science” and this is one of the most popular songs off that album.  While it plays slightly fast and loose with describing the exact composition of the sun, they retain full credit because they wrote their own rebuttal song clarifying where they’d simplified things. That actually puts them ahead of at least 30% of practicing scientists.

Ben: Guys. Guys. I learned so much from this song. Copper can be a gas?

History of Everything (Big Bang Theory theme song) by Barenaked Ladies
Nominated line: Whole Song

Bethany: If you’re a science geek, hold Sheldon Cooper up as a hero, and have an hour or two to kill, go read this post and thread to get excruciating detail on how accurate this song is. For everyone else, don’t cite it in your PhD thesis, but it’s actually pretty close. Plus, it’s popular and admire any band that can make a song with that level of detail catch on.

Ben: To all the Barenaked Ladies haters out there, you should know that I’m basically these people whenever someone takes any shots at BNL.

I’d never actually listened to the entire song before, just the short bit that plays before “Big Bang Theory” episodes, and I enjoyed yet again learning things. Our universe is going to start contracting? Guys, I have not been paying attention to anything. My mind was blown before Kevin Hearn* had even started his keyboard solo.

*Yes, I do know the name of Barenaked Ladies’ keyboardist. Don’t step to me.

Bringing up BNL actually brings up some me-and-Bethany ties, because when I was in 8th grade, my dad took me and her younger brother Tim to a massive outdoor festival in downtown Boston, dropped us off, and arranged to meet us in about 8 hours* at a Dunkin Donuts about a mile away. This was before the age of cell phones. I have literally no idea what would have happened if we hadn’t shown up. Bethany was justifiably furious, as she had been denied going to go see Ani DiFranco earlier that month with friends, and she was a high school junior at the time.

* It was a long concert. The show’s lineup was: The Corrs, Edwin McCain, Sister Hazel, BNL, and Hootie and the Blowfish. My first concert was the most 90’s concert of all time.

Bethany: Thanks for reminding me of this incident. I haven’t harassed my parents about this injustice in years. They’re due for another round. Also, Barenaked Ladies haters only exist in highly controlled lab experiments, not in the wild.

Ben: Oh, phew. I’ll put my Internet Comment Gun back in its holster, then.

In the least shocking development ever, we appear to be going a bit long here. The next 5 songs will be split off into Part 2, going up next week.  Don’t wait until then to complain to us about what we missed, feel free to start now.

Ready for Part 2? Click here!

For the whole series page, go here.

Hi everyone! After 10 weeks on basic internet science, I thought it might be fun to switch things up a bit.  For the next few weeks (more if we get inspired), I’ve invited a very special collaborator to help me put together a definitive guide to the good, the bad and the ugly of science/math references in popular music.

Say hi to Ben!

Ben is a childhood friend of mine who runs ten-four films, his own blog, is funny on Twitter, and he watches movies.  He grew up without a TV, so of course he rebelled and became a professional film maker.  He’s a font of knowledge on music in general and indie rock in particular, and is the kind of person that responds to emails like “what’s up with Rivers Cuomo?” with multi-page missives that are just a few citations short of being a media studies doctoral thesis. Since that kind of brilliant obsessiveness is one the traits I most value in others, Ben has always been one of my go tos for all things pop culture. If you want to get  a sense of where he’s coming from, check out his favorite albums, TV shows, songs, and movies of 2015.

Anything else you’d like to tell the nice people Ben?

Ben: Hello! And thanks for having me. As Bethany mentioned, this is the sort of thing I do when only vaguely prompted, or sometimes entirely unprompted, and for an audience that often consists of only myself. As Dante once noted, you have to follow your own star.*

*I’m mostly sure this is a Dante quote, but the Internet might be fooling me again.

I like appearing on this site, because it gives me a veneer of intellectual robustness, which is somewhat undercut by the fact that I had to use a thesaurus site right there because I couldn’t remember the word “robust.”

Okay, so what are the rules here?

Both Ben and I have a healthy dose of petty despot in us, so everything’s subject to change at our whim. However, here’s how we started:

1. We kept the definition of “science songs” pretty broad. We decided to include things that referenced math, scientists and medicine, in addition to more general science stuff.
2. We drew the line at “science”. Some people try to sneak what are basically “geek” references on to science lists. Dungeons and dragons, while geeky, is not actual science.
3. The whole song didn’t have to be about science. I’m a pretty big fan of the one line reference, so sometimes that’s all it took to make the list.
4. I classified how good the science was according to my own whims, Ben classified how good the song was according to his. Ben’s a filmmaker, my taste in music is terrible. It works better this way. Basically, if you don’t think the song should have made the list it did, complain to me. If you don’t like it’s order on the list, complain to Ben.

Wait, Ben, did I just make those rules up or is that how you did things too?

Ben: You made all those rules up. I just followed your lead. But I think we ended up contributing a roughly equal amount of songs to this endeavor, and I think it’s pretty telling we both had mental lists of songs in which we had either applauded or been irked by the science displayed.

Frankly, this is a pretty ideal setup, with you placing the ball on the tee for me here. I’m glad to be Waldorf to your Statler.

Now that you’re all up to speed, we’ll see you next Sunday for “Ten Songs that Got Science Right”.

Click here to read Part 1 of “Ten Songs that Got Science Right!”