MIT in Popular Culture - Music

Music

In the Broadway musical Rent (1996–2008), a major character, Tom Collins, is expelled from teaching at MIT, "for theory of actual reality."

The song "Etoh" by the electronic music group The Avalanches describes MIT as "the home of complicated computers, which speak a mechanical language all their own." This lyric can be taken literally, or it can be read metaphorically as a description of MIT student culture. Allan Sherman's paean to initialisms, "Harvey and Sheila," notes that Harvey "works for IBM; he went to MIT, got his PhD." Rhythm and blues group Tony! Toni! Toné! mentions MIT in the song "Born Not To Know," from their 1988 debut album Who? In the song, a pretentious individual rattles off a long list of his impressive academic credentials—culminating with a "Ph. D from MIT"—only to then ask, "so, can I get a job?" Tony! Toni! Toné! responds with a resounding "No!"

"Nerdcore" rap artist MC Hawking's song "All My Shootin's Be Drive-bys" (1997) takes tropes associated with gangsta rap and plays them out in a more academic setting. He speaks of taking revenge for the death of a friend, part of his Cambridge, UK crew:

I saw Little Pookie just the other day.

Pookie was my boy we shared Kool-Aid in the park,

now some punks took his life in the dark.

I ask Doomsday who the motherfuckers be,

"some punk ass bitches from MIT."

When the narrator learns the identity of Pookie's killers, he decides to "give a Newtonian demonstration, of a bullet its mass and its acceleration," leaving six MIT students dead in the street.

"Weird Al" Yankovic's "White & Nerdy" (2006) riffs upon MIT, along with a plenitude of other geek culture references — The Star Wars Holiday Special, pocket protectors and editing Wikipedia, to name a few. Yankovic claims that he graduated "first in class here at MIT"; however, the Institute does not assign class rankings or confer traditional Latin honors upon its graduates.

Over the years, the students and faculty of MIT have produced their own share of musical material. For example, the mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer taught for a time in MIT's political science department, lecturing on quantitative methods and statistics. This experience led him to write a song called "Sociology," played to the tune of Irving Berlin's "Choreography." The lyrics conclude,

They consult, sounding occult,

Talking like a mathematics Ph.D.

They can snow all their clients,

By calling it "science"—

Although it's only sociology!

Students have also written their own songs during their tenures at the Institute. This tradition, which goes back at least to The Doormat Singers of the 1960s, continues with several present-day groups.