Science Gets a Bad Rap
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008I don’t know a lot about rap artist and all-around creative guy RZA, but what I do know of him (or, rather, his work) I like. One thing to add to the things I like about him that I just learned today is he wants to be a scientist:
But what Wu-Tang Clan mastermind, established solo artist, actor, soundtrack composer and author RZA really wants to do is become a one-man U.S. government think tank. … “I was talking to my wife about this recently. I was like, ‘Yo, don’t you think [the government] should just hire me and put me in a research lab for ten years so I can just research something?’”
Pretty cool, right? Except that, he then goes to show that maybe he doesn’t quite know how science works:
But he seems to be pretty serious about the concept. “All these f—ing ideas I got in the scientific world, they just not being heard because I’m a musician. That’s kind of weird.”
One of the beautiful things about science is that anyone can do it: you don’t have to be a Government-Certified Scientist™ to get your ideas out, you just have to do the science. If your theories are sound, and if your science holds, it will be heard. (Okay, it’s not quite that easy, since you’d have to get your ideas before some sort of review board to get published, but there are even ways around that. I mean, if the ID crowd can get their “science” out there…)
The thing is, in its way, it can’t be that different than the music scene that RZA is a part of. It’s not like, in the flipside, there’s some researcher sitting in his lab saying, “All these great songs I got in me, and they’re just not being heard because I’m a scientist.” If the scientist really has great songs, and he goes out and makes them and gets people to listen to them, they’ll be heard.
As hard as that is, it’s really that easy.