Rapbassador == funky49

Steven Rush (in blue) on the Reel Science panel

Hello and thank you for having me. I’m here because something really cool was created and shared. I’m talking about Kate McAlpine‘s Large Hadron Collider rap on Youtube. How many of you have seen this video? As of July 2010, the LHC rap has been viewed almost six million times. That’s like if every single person in Nicaragua watched it. Six million is double the amount of Apple iPADs sold. Six million is also the amount of times that I have watched Back to the Future.

Six million... the number of times I have seen Back to the Future

So how did I get hooked up with Fermilab? I blame Dr. Ben Kilminster. He is a scientist and music aficionado at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He saw a write-up about me that someone shared on ScientificBlogging.com. The post was about an album I created on my own to promote Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry. He wanted Fermilab to have some sort of outreach. After Dr. Kilminster’s email, I immediately read up on Fermilab and particle physics. He mentioned a PBS documentary on Fermilab called The Atom Smashers. He also mentioned that he “happened” to be in this film.

Dr. Ben Kiminster in The Atom Smashers

I found The Atom Smashers very entertaining as it framed the science of the Higgs-Boson race with insight into the lives of scientists. One of the most educational moments is Dr. Leon Lederman breaking down the Tevatron on an episode of Donahue. The first verse of Particle Business is me restating Dr. Lederman’s explanation of particle colliders in rhyme form.

Because of my correspondence with Dr Kilminster I wanted to reference the competitive collaboration between CERN and Fermilab as well as between the CDF and D0 experiments at Fermilab. The last verse features a certain analog-styled synthesizer element. I wanted this to harken back to the sounds of the Vangelis‘ soundtrack used on Carl Sagan‘s Cosmos. The third verse also starts off the line “to me triple beams don’t mean pushing mad coke, it’s scientists in lab coats.” In rap music, the triple-beam scales of the science lab are mentioned as a way of measuring cocaine. I wanted to take that instrument of science and bring it back into the lab.

I did not want to just create a song, I wanted a music video to go along with it. To do this, I reached out to an online friend who happens to live near Fermilab. Dan Lamoureux. Dan is best known for creating the documentary, Nerdcore for Life. This documentary shows the roots of the nerdcore hip-hop music scene and has a small cameo appearance by yours truly *cough*. Dan immediately agreed to help and had a vision for the music video. Dan’s vision was he wanted to present Fermilab as bad ass.

This was congruent with my idea of the music to have a tough and aggressive feeling. When I first got to Fermilab, I scouted outside location shoots. One location I wanted to use had a reference to Douglas Adams. Who has heard of Douglas Adams? As you then known, in his Hitchhiker’s novels there is a special reference to the number, 42. Behind the D0 facility, there are liquid nitrogen and liquid helium tanks. One of which has a 42 on it.  Unfortunately the backdrop did not work for Dan.

#42 on a liquid nitrogen tank

The Fermilab bison was one location which was great to shoot at. As you can imagine, bison are under-represented in hip-hop music videos! Dan framed me in the foreground with the bison really close to the fence behind me. Unfortunately when the music starting going and I started rapping, the bison moved away! We were not the only ones drawn to the bison.

funky49 with some kids

Also there were two little kids and their aunt. In one of the papers that morning, the aunt had read about Fermilab having an unofficial rapper. When she saw me in my funky49 jersey and Dan with his video camera, she had an easy time figuring out that she found us. We got to have our pictures taken together. Also during the bison shoot, we would hear honking and see people waving at us from passing vehicles. We waved back and I felt like the Fresh Prince of Fermilab.