Songs of Science #1

By Rob Mitchum & Jake Reimer | 2.26.07

When it comes to song lyrics, science is a pretty rare subject. The reasons are many: most musicians tended to stay away from science class in high school (in my experience, at least), love songs don’t mesh well with microbiology, and it’s hard to find a word that rhymes with hypothesis. But every so often, a songwriter ventures into the territory of science, whether intentionally or no. Songs of Science will be an intermittent series profiling these infrequent moments, profiling some of the best (and worst) of scientific music, building a mixtape for the lab stereo track by track.

The Who - "I'm a Boy"

For the brief period between their tenure as mod gods and their debut as rock operators, The Who were pretty damn weird. As Pete Townshend made the transition from teenage love songs to album-length musical narratives, he entertained himself with three-minute stories that seem a bit like inside jokes, goofy character studies such as “Happy Jack” and “Tattoo.” “I’m a Boy” seems to be another dashed-off novelty song in this vein, with its gender-confused child narrator, but in retrospect it actually shows off Townshend, always a sucker for sci-fi and technology, at his scientific best.

Originally, “I’m a Boy” was intended to be part of a rock opera about a bizarre future where medicine had advanced to the point where, get this, parents could choose the gender of their child! Crazy, right?  Unfortunately, somebody gets one family’s sex order wrong, and delivers a boy (Bill) instead of a girl. Making lemonade out of bureaucratic-error lemons, the family chooses to raise Bill as a girl anyway, a nature/nurture experiment that doesn’t exactly take. Despite their efforts to cram Bill into a feminine gender role, he triumphantly announces his Y-chromosome each chorus, and spends the verses lamenting that he’s not allowed to participate in manly activities like getting muddy, bloody, and, um, playing cricket – we are in Britain (sorry: FUTURE-Britain), after all.

Townshend’s uncanny prediction of genetic engineering is pretty neat, and the gender selection of his song has recently become possible when combined with in vitro fertilization, using a method invented to assist with cattle husbandry. This “MicroSort” method (Bill Gates’ lawyers are on the phone) has been proven to be 91% effective in producing girls upon request, leaving a 9% chance of Bill happening in our modern world. There are, of course, lots of ethical concerns to ruin this Tomorrowland ability for all of us, most notably the perverse potential of this technology to further worsen the gender imbalance in certain Asian countries where daughters are, due to cultural norms, financial liabilities.

Beyond sex selection, “I’m a Boy” is also surprisingly accurate regarding the apparent behavioral inflexibility of gender, a conclusion that has been supported based on observations of children who underwent genital reassignment at an early age.  This procedure is sometimes performed on babies who are born “intergender,” with ambiguous genitalia, or who suffer some sort of early injury to their genitalia (yowch). Typically, when a male child was thought to have “severe inadequacy of the penis,” their genitalia was surgically transformed into a vagina, a conversion that is much easier, technically, than the other direction.

Unfortunately, many of these intersex children were also born with testicles, often undescended, that proceeded to churn out male sex hormones oblivious to the change in groin architecture. Thus, despite being raised as girls by their parents, when many of these children hit puberty, they began to feel a bit…off, a confusion furthered by the fact that many were unaware of their intersex origin. Many of these children begin to exhibit “tomboy” behavioral traits, even before puberty, suggesting that their brains were developing as males despite the societal influence of being dressed and treated like a girl, and the visual evidence (often helped along by taking sexual hormones) of their femininity.

Due to the psychological trauma experienced in cases like this, intersex activists have begun to lobby against genitalia reassignment, arguing that children should be allowed to make their own decision about what gender they would like to join when they’ve grown to an appropriate age. Interestingly, however, these activists also argue that the child should be raised as either a boy or a girl, rather than some kind of indeterminate third gender, despite the lack of surgical assignment. So Bill, whether intersex or victim of genetic engineering error, would likely not have been saved from his gender confusion, even in today’s more enlightened society.“I’m a Boy” may not be quite as in-depth a portrayal of intersex adolescence as Middlesex, and may not have the hermaphrodite swagger of David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” but in its scientific prophecy, neither is it the throwaway novelty it may have appeared in 1966.

Guided by Voices - "I Am a Scientist"

The scientific community doesn’t really have a national anthem, a song they can put hand on heart and sing to themselves every morning before getting out their pipettes, needles, and slide rules. Guided By Voices are a good band to turn to for this gaping deficiency, since Robert Pollard’s entire M.O. has been to write tunes with the bombast of an anthem, a predilection brought out especially during his phase of repeatedly composing “I Am a ___” songs. So how does this fan-favorite track and single from 1994’s Bee Thousand record measure up as a celebration of laboratory patriotism? Let’s dissect the lyrics.

I am a scientist, I seek to understand me

A pretty good start - what scientist hasn’t gravitated towards personal afflictions and interests in their professional work?

All of my impurities and evils yet unknown

OK, that’s getting a little personal: impurities maybe, in the sense of studying diseases with causes both internal (genetic disorders) and external (obesity or addiction). But evils? That’s a bit judgmental for scientific purposes, and studying the biological basis of evil hasn’t progressed far beyond poking and prodding Hitler’s brain.

I am a journalist, I write to you to show you

Hey, maybe this would work better as the national anthem for Litmus!

I am an incurable, and nothing else behaves like me

The first part is a little hopelessly pessimistic for the scientific pursuit (though a pretty accurate description of how many grad students may feel), but the second statement is highly reflective of the arrogance that almost seems prerequisite for top-flight researchers. We’ll call it a draw.

After this opening verse, the song gets a little distracted; not a big problem, given that most people only remember the first few lines of a national anthem anyway. There are some more relevant sections, dealing with ethics (“I know what’s right”), cognitive neuroscience (“just unlock my mind”), pharmacology (“prescriptions I will fill you”), and the tedium of research (“the hole I dig is bottomless”). Unfortunately, the best line of the song – “I shoot myself with rock & roll” – doesn’t really fit science at all…but you’ve got to admit it’d be pretty kick-ass to sing every morning. Until a better option is suggested, I vote we make it mandatory, though we’ll keep the accompanying probe-swinging choreography to a minimum.

Barenaked Ladies - "Aluminum"

Lead singer and guitarists Steven Page and Ed Robertson were just 22 in 1992 when the Barenaked Ladies released their debut major-label release, “Gordon”. The album was not especially well-received in the states, but was an immediate hit in BNL’s Canadian homeland, where it went double-platinum. It was also a favorite album of mine in high-school, but I never warmed up to much of their later work. The youthful lyrical style that had seemed so refreshingly straightforward and playfully innocent in “Gordon” started to strike me as annoyingly superficial to me in their later albums – the track “Aluminum” from their 2003 release “Everything to Everyone” is a good example. Page and Robertson use the properties of aluminum as a heavy-handed metaphor for a low-value person who puts on a high-value front. The song lays out the comparison with all the subtlety of a late Spielberg film:

How, in every visible way, you shine
As if the stars in your wake align
Almost impossible to malign.
…
You can shine like silver all you want
But you're just Aluminum
…
Illuminating just what you want to show
You'd never rust, but I'd never know
…
You're so lightweight, how can you survive?
Recycling moments from others' lives
You're not as precious as you contrive.

My God, what can they mean?! Luckily, Robertson provides some hermeneutic assistance in his blog: He writes of the track, “It’s a song about aluminum.”

No doubt Page and Robertson intended to tap into a timeless metaphor, and certainly the key features of aluminum they describe - its shiny appearance, its resistance to corrosion, and its lightweight nature – are universally recognized. But the song really relies on the comparison made in the chorus: “You can shine like silver all you want / But you're just Aluminum.” The comparison is between a cheap, almost disposable material, and a metal worthy of bling and heirloom kitchen implements. While that’s a contrast that makes sense today, it would have been quite strange to an earlier audience – granted, a much earlier audience, say someone kicking back to one of Edison’s original phonographs in the early 1880s.

Due to the extremely expensive process that was required to extract metallic aluminum from bauxite (aluminum ore), the price of an ounce of aluminum in the 1880s was on par with the cost of silver, and annual production of the metal was extremely low. Less than four tons of aluminum were produced in 1884 – compare that with the almost three thousand tons of silver produced in the same year. Far from playing homely sister to the precious metals we recognize today, aluminum had wide popular appeal: Like an attractive new debutante, a bar of aluminum was presented to the public at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle. On the other side of the channel, in 1857, Charles Dickens admired the metal in his weekly publication, Household Words: “What do you think of a metal as white as silver, as unalterable as gold, as easily melted as copper, as tough as iron; which is malleable, ductile, and with the singular quality of being lighter than glass?” In fact, in the 1850s, when the first commercial processes for producing aluminum were put into operation, aluminum was for a short period more expensive than gold or platinum.

So what happened in the past 150 years to transform our estimation of aluminum so that it now seems barely worthy of being wrapped around twelve ounces of cheap beer? For that, you can credit a Frenchman, Paul Louis Toussaint Héroult, and an American, Charles Martin Hall. In 1886, those two young scientists independently discovered a much cheaper and easier way to refine aluminum, by dissolving bauxite ore in cryolite (a naturally occurring form of sodium aluminum fluoride - Na3AlF6), and using electrolysis (applying an electric current to the solution) to produce pure aluminum. The Héroult-Hall process is still used today to produce virtually all of the aluminum in circulation.  By the way, when I say “young” scientists, I mean it – like Page and Richardson, Héroult and Hall were just 22 when their work produced the precious metal that kicked off their careers.