SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: This has no scientific source data; it’s a penitential cover for being late for the April song. It was originally written and recorded by Monkey Swallows the Universe.
ABSTRACT:
The first decade of the 21st century was a good time for long band names. I mean, besides this project you’re reading now, you had Fight Like Apes, you had A Kite is a Victim, you had Something For Kate, and you had, from Sheffield, England, Monkey Swallows the Universe. Fight Like Apes was named for a sample from Planet of the Apes, and this band was named for an episode of a TV series based on the adventures of the mythic Chinese hero the Monkey King.
On an indie pop-genre evolutionary scale, MStU was somewhere after the end of twee proper and somewhere before the fullness of dream pop. They were sweet and catchy, and to be perfectly honest, I only discovered them shortly after I started this Guild of Scientific Troubadours malarkey and decided that penitential covers should be a thing, thought I might someday run out of pre-existent science-songs that I already knew so started combing the iTunes library (as it then was, when YouTube was all TV clips and Spotify was not a twinkle in a tech designer’s eye) by randomly plugging in scientific terminology. Starting, of course, with “Science.” And this sweet song popped up.
So in a way, I’ve thought about covering it since, I don’t know, 2007?
Even more embarrassing, I started recording this thing here in December. Of 2019. I think the last tracking – the last recording of audio – was done sometime in January. And then I sort of poked at it, thought the vocoder was funny and maybe I should get a better vocal track down to really play around with that effect, fiddled a little with drums, and then… sort of left it there. It’s a great song. This is a weird version of it. It will never not be weird.
Maybe part of my hesitation, too, is that it might be *named* “Science,” but it’s actually a sort of anti-scientific song about a plane crash caused by people ceasing to believe that planes could fly. For ages, I thought the pre-chorus said, “And there’s no monsters in the sea as the plane goes down.” Apparently, the lyric actually is, “And there’s now monsters in the sea….”
But to be perfectly honest with myself, the Guild has never been scientific itself – I haven’t really done experimentation based on a falsifiable hypothesis, haven’t even really done market research or promotion based on A-B testing. It’s been an aesthetic exercise based on enthusiasm for science. So, really, I can’t judge. I’ll let the singing robot choirs do the judging for me. The song has some good insights into primate psychology.
Besides, I always wanted to give it, dreamy as it sounds, a “That Thing You Do” drum beat. Now I have.
Enjoy it. An original is mostly done, and two more covers on the way.