As one of his last acts on the International Space Station before touching down on terra firma tonight, astronaut and musician Chris Hadfield recorded his own take on David Bowie’s Space Oddity. The footage stands as the first music video ever recorded in space (while still leaving room for others to nab the titles of first musical performance entirely recorded in space and first fully live ... »
More skeptical hip-hop! I can’t get enough! Today’s lab track also happened to be submitted by (and features!) another rapper who was highlighted in a Lab Track, Marshall “Gripp” Gillson (Go listen to that one, too!). Today’s artist is Jack & The Mad Psyentist, who just released The Five Pillars EP, a musical critique on modern society using the five pillars of Is... »
Today’s Lab Track requires a bit of explanation. Back in 2005, British singer Katie Melua had a track on the radio entitled “Nine Million Bicycles.” In it, she mentions various facts about the world (for example, there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, there are six billion people in the world [this was 2005, folks, cool your jets]), then uses a bit of poetic finagling to con... »
Today’s lab track features a hip-hop artist from my own fair city of Chicago. Gabe Caruso raps about a variety of topics, but many of them tend toward a criticism of religion. This one is no exception. It’s easy to write a song about atheism or skepticism and have it come off stilted — nobody ever said words like “falsifiable” were poetic — but Gabe is one of th... »
I got sorta giddy when I saw that Nick Cave had written a song about the Higgs Boson, and it’s about the delegitimizing of religion in the face of science to boot. But then it turns out to be more of a lament than anything (Who cares what the future brings?). While Cave has always been critical of religion in general, he is notoriously slippery and hard to pin down on the God question. He se... »
I think I’ve discovered something about myself: Put skepticism in a rap song and I am SOLD. Science words don’t work so well in pretty, lyrical songs, but twist them up in some freestyle and it’s like they were made for it. And with that, I give you today’s lab track, courtesy of labber Charles. MC Frontalot, who calls his genre “nerdcore hip hop,” performs this... »
If you haven’t heard of Garfunkel and Oates, boy, have I just opened up your world. They’re a comedy music duo from LA who I first heard on Savage Love singing Dan’s favorite of their songs, Pregnant Women are Smug. Just explore their Youtube library. You won’t be sorry. Today’s lab track (suggested by Ryan who saw it on Victor’s Facebook wall) is decidedly not ... »
In honor of Ryan’s post today about Professor Brian Cox’s new series on BBC, and because watching that video last night put this song in my head for the next 12 hours, I give you the song that that video’s biology-centric theme song was based on — same singer (and lyricist) and all. I don’t need to introduce it much more than that, since if you haven’t seen Mont... »
