VivaSync

A motley collection of musicians have turned their attentions to science over the years - sometimes rigorously, sometimes tenuously and sometimes downright inaccurately. Examine our seventeen specimens and post your own findings below the line.

David Bowie - Drive in Saturday

It’s the year 2033, and human beings have forgotten how to have sex; this is the premise behind one of the late Starman’s finest sci-fi singles. Also worthy of mention are TVC15, about a man cuckolded by a television, and of course Space Oddity, in which the astronaut Major Tom loses touch with planet Earth forever.

The Cure - Jupiter Crash

Not all astronomical activity is thrilling, as Robert Smith reminds us in this gloomy tale of romantic disappointment. The song recalls his experience of watching the remnants of the Shoemaker-Levy comet crashing into Jupiter in 1994: a much-anticipated cosmic event at the time. “Was that it?” asks Smith’s love-interest, “kinda wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for”.

Diana Ross - Chain Reaction

Despite the chemistry-suggesting title, the reactions taking place in this Motown classic are decidedly biological, dealing with what we might delicately call experiments in carnal cause-and-effect. “Nature has a way of yielding pleasure”, Ross reassures us, semi-scientifically. Written by the Bee Gees, it surely ranks as one of the filthiest songs to be covered by Steps.

Kate Bush - Cloudbusting

This moving, celebratory single from ‘Hounds of Love’ is inspired by the Austrian radical scientist Wilhelm Reich. Having been a respected psychoanalyst, Reich’s psychosexual experiments became increasingly eccentric, and in the 1950s he invented a ‘cloudbuster’, a machine designed to induce rain. Bush tells the story from the perspective of Reich’s son, Peter, recalling his father’s eventual arrest.

Blackalicious - Chemical Calisthenics

Gift of Gab, the verbally agile rapper in the hip-hop duo Blackalicious, takes the listener on a kaleidoscopic journey round the periodic table in this track from 2002’s ‘Blazing Arrow’. The dizzying catalogue of of chemistry-inspired metaphor includes the confusing assertion: “You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium; molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow!”

The Flaming Lips - What is the Light?

The 1999 album ‘The Soft Bulletin’ contains numerous dreamy experiments in scientific speculation, including this so-called ‘Untested Hypothesis Suggesting That the Chemical [In Our Brains] by Which We Are Able to Experience the Sensation of Being in Love Is the Same Chemical That Caused the “Big Bang” That Was the Birth of the Accelerating Universe’. The song itself is a typically wide-eyed and questing reverie.

Björk - Mutual Core

In 2011 the Icelandic innovator released ‘Biophilia’; an album comprised of profoundly science-influenced meditations, with each track accompanied by an immersive mobile-app. Other tracks tackled quantum physics, conservation and crystallography, while ‘Mutual Core’ considers plate tectonics; an area not often addressed in rock music. “What you resist, persists”, warns the knowing, sensual vocalist.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle - NaCl

Kate McGarrigle, that late figurehead of folk royalty, wrote NaCl for the 1978 album Pronto Monto. Rather than applying science to human love, as other songwriters on this list have, McGarrigle does the reverse, telling the story of the romantic courtship of a chlorine and a sodium atom, who marry and become sodium chloride. “Think of the love you eat”, she sings, “when you salt your meat.”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Higgs Boson Blues

“I’m goin’ down to Geneva, baby”, whispers Cave threateningly, presumably en route to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The song was written after the 2012 discovery of the ‘god particle’, and beckons us into a skewed and ghoulish dystopia where physics seems somehow unreliable, and fact and fiction are blurred.

Josh Ritter - The Temptation of Adam

One of Ritter’s great story-songs, The Temptation of Adam tells of a love affair between two scientists inside an underground atomic weapons silo, peppered with nuclear physics-related wordplay. “Our love would live a half-life on the surface” fears the increasingly-mournful narrator, as he considers pressing the “great big button” to ensure their love will never die.

Ella Fitzgerald - How High the Moon

Nancy Hamilton’s jazz standard, sung energetically by Ella Fitzgerald, expresses love as a condition of cosmic wonder and uncertainty, staring at the moon in child-like bafflement. Though not the most factually knowledgeable song on the list - “does it reach to Mars?” asks Ella - it articulates that most important scientific characteristic: curiosity.

Jarvis Cocker - Quantum Theory

“Somewhere everyone is happy”, sings Jarvis on his first solo album, “somewhere fish do not have bones”. He thereby expresses the poignancy of the multiverse: a perfect world exists somewhere among infinite inaccessible alternatives, but that knowledge is scant consolation to Jarvis Cocker, struggling with disappointment, grief, and presumably a few too many bones in his haddock.

They Might Be Giants - I am a Paleontologist

During the naughties, the always-lovable indie duo TMBG turned their hands to making educational albums for children, explaining literacy and numeracy in cheerful and irreverent terms. The third such album was ‘Here Comes Science’, and featured this catchy number - the only song on our list to feature the word ‘pachycephalosaurus’.

Arcade Fire - Reflektor

Worrying about the dangers of technological progress has become something of a hobby-horse for the Québécois rockers, and their latest album, Reflektor, continued this vein. Its title single (with a spooky backing-vocal from Bowie himself) decried the narcissism and alienation brought about by the internet age. “We’re so connected”, the song agonises, “but are we even friends?”

Joanna Newsom - Emily

Emily, the first of only five tracks on Newsom’s second album, is a yearning, 12-minute love-letter to her sister Dr Emily Newsom, an astrophysicist. The long, meandering song expresses Joanna’s abject amazement at Emily’s brilliance, and the strange divisions between them as artist and scientist respectively. During the chorus, Newsom wrongly defines the word ‘meteoroid’, illustrating her failure to fully grasp her sister’s knowledge - fans are divided over whether or not the error is deliberate.

Katie Melua/Simon Singh - Nine Million Bicycles

The scientist Simon Singh rewrote the lyrics to Katie Melua’s Nine Million Bicycles, after he objected to her suggestion that the estimated size of the universe was “a guess”. Very sportingly, Melua agreed to re-record the offending lyrics for the Today programme, including the line “with the available information I predict that I will always be with you”.

And finally...

B.o.B - Flatline

Last month, the Georgia rapper decided that the Earth was flat, tweeting that humanity had been ‘tremendously deceived’. A rap-battled ensued between him and outraged TV scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson, which resulted in this maniacal regurgitation of conspiracy theories - a rare example of anti-science in music. “Use your common sense!” he urges, before pledging his support for David Irving, the noted holocaust-denier.

Which of your favourite science-themed songs do you feel should have been included? Post them in the comments below.

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