One reason I love my job is because I get to be the person to expose younger people to brand-new knowledge, science, art, and music – often all at once, in a single lecture. Remixing political science with movies, music, comics, and other art forms creates associations that are more accessible and permanent. While teaching social science methods to new scholars can be challenging, I have found that musical associations in particular help students simplify and remember difficult concepts.
This Good Playlist is a collection of songs that represent different stages of the social science process, and reflects more than a decade of teaching. Some of these associations are clear simply from the song titles. For example, “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas” is about an uncommitted love interest, but the title easily translates to the uncertain nature of political and social relationships, pun intended, we test by observing the world. With any luck, students will hum this catchy song when trying to remember the differences between theory and hypotheses. “Fight the Power” and “Forget the World” are similarly pithy reminders for important empirical concepts. Other songs are more directly about the nature of social science. For example, “Never Ending Math Equation” and “Statistician’s Blues” each explore the pitfalls of trying to quantify social phenomena.
Most of the other songs on this list are a mix of nominal amusement and informative lyrics, and demonstrate a way for instructors to bring concepts to life with music. Peter Gabriel’s “Come Talk Me,” for instance, explores the difficulties of one-on-one conversations and getting people to open up about themselves:
“Oh please talk to me
Won’t you please talk to me
We can unlock this misery
Come on, come talk to me
I did not come to steal
This all is so unreal
Can’t you show me how you feel?
Now come on, come talk to me”
Similarly, the Middle Kids remind us to think nonlinearly when modeling political and social relationships:
“I am one bend away
I am one step away
I am holding all the pieces in place
But maybe you’ve got to break me to see what I’m made of”
Some of these songs have explicit language. Where I could, I tried to find clean versions but this was not always possible. The Wu-Tang Clan’s song “Weak Spot” is always in my headphones when doing diagnostics (but only in my headphones; NSFW):
“Good looking, son, yo, son, bring the hook in
You can never find Zig weak spot, stop lookingYou thought you’d find my weak spot
But still you failed
You thought you’d find my weak spot
But still you failed”
Even if all of these songs don’t work for your class, they hopefully demonstrate a way for you to find music that will simplify complicated material and make that class session and concept more memorable for students. Here’s the full playlist:
Social science methods playlist:
- “I Am A Scientist” – Guided By Voices (social science philosophy)
- “Don’t Wanna Fight” – Alabama Shakes (literature reviews)
- “I Might Be Wrong” – Radiohead (falsifiability)
- “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas” – Nat King Cole (hypotheses)
- “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” (cover) – Cake
- “If I Were a Boy” – Beyoncé (counterfactuals)
- “I Wish That I Was Beautiful For You” – Darren Hanlon (formal models)
- “Never Ending Math Equation” – Modest Mouse (quant approaches)
- “Statistician’s Blues” – Todd Snider
- “Forget the World” – Kleenex Girl Wonder (experiments)
- “Time Tough” – Toots & the Maytals (time series)
- “Fight the Power” – Public Enemy (large-N observations)
- “Come Talk to Me” – Peter Gabriel (face-to-face interviews)
- “Common People” – Pulp (public opinion surveys)
- “Not the Same” – Ben Folds (operationalization)
- “Blue” – The Jayhawks (Best Linear Unbiased Estimator)
- “Bend” – Middle Kids (nonlinearity)
- “Close But Not Quite” – Everything is Recorded & Sampha (model fit/R2)
- “Chasing Shadows” – Santigold (p-hacking)
- “I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler” – YACHT (prediction)
- “Opposite Direction” – Union of Knives (endogeneity)
- “Weak Spot” – Wu-Tang Clan (diagnostics)
- “Unbelievers” – Vampire Weekend (reviewers)
- “10,000 Words” – The Avett Brothers (journal limits)
Eric Gonzalez Juenke is a 2025-2026 Good Authority fellow.
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