"Geneticists know what’s happenin'": Viral Science Rap

SoundSlides

Image Credit: Baba Brinkman

In the spirit of Elizabeth’s “Picturing Poetry” post from a few weeks back, I’ve assembled a few of my favorite DIY science-rap videos. These multimedia productions collectively offer an alternative model for science communication, challenging top-down popularizations by talking-head experts and giving us new images of what it means to learn about and practice science.

Image Credit: Kate McAlpine, "Large Hadron Rap"

The goofiest of the lot might be the "Large Hadron Rap," the brainchild of Kate McAlpine, a science writer for CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). Shot a few months before the particle accelerator was started up in September 2008, the video has a charming (and disarming) low-tech, homespun quality that belies the supercollider’s multi-billion dollar price tag. Even more so than her instructional rhymes about the Higgs boson particle, McAlpine's gamely exaggerated performance works against fears prompted by the doomsday predictions that circulated in the months before the collider launched, as well as a murkier sense of distrust surrounding Big Physics, with its inscrutable (for most of us) questions.

Image Credit: Tom McFadden, "Regulatin' Genes"

H / T to Elaine

At Stanford, Human Biology instructor Tom McFadden has created a series of raps around course topics like metabolism, gene regulation, and cellular division. (You can scope out others on McFadden's youtube channel.) He stars in a few, along with a rotating cast of Stanford undergraduates and cameos by professors. Despite the gleefully hammed up performances and at times ungainly lyrics, these raps do serious work: by drawing on the rhetorical canons of memory and delivery, they demonstrate how performance can enable students to take ownership of content and concepts. I also love the atmosphere of unabashed fun generated through these collaborations, both for McFadden's Human Biology section and (based on the youtube comments) for bio students everywhere who have come across these videos. If the LHC and Stanford raps don’t always succeed artistically, they communicate how science is not necessarily opposed to a sense of play.

Image Credit: Baba Brinkman, "Performance, Feedback, Revision"

In contrast, the performances of Baba Brinkman (a self-styled “rap troubadour”) hinge on his skills as a wordsmith. Brinkman, with his MA in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, repurposes the rapper’s swagger to imbue scientists like Darwin and Dawkins with an iller-than-thou rep. Brinkman’s lyrics not only make the concepts accessible; they also argue for and model what it means for non-specialists to engage with scientific debates. And in songs like “Performance, Feedback, Revision,” which proposes an analogy between the writing process and descent with modification, Brinkman deftly weaves together art and science to create a spirit of convergence (or consilience, to borrow Wilson’s term).

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