White geek’s burden
By Thoreau
My wife and I decided to check out The Bachelor, and one of the women is an epidemiology PhD student doing a rap about love as a disease. Between that and the LHC Rap, we white people have much to apologize for.
To white science geeks everywhere, I must say this: If you absolutely insist on rapping, please, please, PLEASE listen to a rap song written after 1989. I’m just sayin’, yo. Even the cosmic embarrassment known as Vanilla Ice at least had more rap style than white science geeks. If you want to see some science geek rap, go to 1:37 in this video. Still pretty basic stuff, but at least it has some variation in the beginning.
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Comment by Vol-E —
January 3, 2012 @ 6:02 am
Thoreau, It’s a day or two (or three) late, but I hope your new year is happy, peaceful and prosperous, all the way through!
Comment by Gabriel —
January 3, 2012 @ 9:03 am
You may like this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?src_vid=e3DRTBUQplQ
He does proper rapping on topics like astrobiology and such, he’s a good friend of a guy who I worked with this summer, quite into the London rap scene. Both educational and pretty good beats.
Comment by Gabriel —
January 3, 2012 @ 9:21 am
How about a black guy rapping about black scientists?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glFtpumGR10
Comment by Professor Coldheart —
January 3, 2012 @ 9:26 am
If you absolutely insist on rapping, please, please, PLEASE listen to a rap song written after 1989.
YES. THIS.
I think this tendency emerges from the white academic consideration that the most important thing about a rap song is enunciating the lyrics.
Comment by LibertyMike —
January 3, 2012 @ 10:03 am
Thoreau, whatever else you may think about me, YOU ARE RIGHT!
Now, why don’t you start with this:
Rappin’ ain’t about recipe.
Comment by Thoreau —
January 3, 2012 @ 1:30 pm
If a person lacks rapping skillz but really wants to do a science rap parody, instead of composing in bad 80’s style the person should spoof a specific, more recent rap song.
I’m just gonna throw a few out there:
“18 nanoseconds, 18 nanoseconds,
You mess with one calibration got you by 18 nanoseconds,
18 nanoseconds, 18 nanoseconds,
And after it was published he found out the data’s wrong,
Now I ain’t saying that it’s forged data,
But I ain’t seeing any tachyons.”
Or:
“Can we pretend that leptons in Geneva
Are like tachyons?
I just really want a Nobel now, Nobel now, Nobel now.
Somebody take me back to the day,
Before I had my tenure, before I had duties.”
Or, find some other genre that you can actually perform in, like this awesome lab:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0
Comment by Fraud Guy —
January 3, 2012 @ 8:54 pm
This is why all my song stylings are based on either 70’s or 80’s pop songs, or, in some cases, their lineal descendants in modern country.
Comment by The Plural Is Golla —
January 3, 2012 @ 10:18 pm
ASHER ROTH & MC CHRIS LIBEL!!!!
JUICEBOXXX TOO ALSO. (& you know he’s hardcore, since he spells his name with three exes.)