It used to be you went to college to get hammered by bad beer and great music. Nowadays, you go there to get a label deal or craft revisionist raps on biostatistics.
Take Mad Dragon Records, for example, the indie label owned by Philadelphia's Drexel University. Managed by students enrolled in the school's music industry program, the label inked a deal with Ryko Distribution and garnered good press, from big shots like Billboard and Rolling Stone to niche pubs like Paste and Relix. Mad Dog's latest release is Fighting Trees, from throwback poppers The Swimmers, whose main man Steve Yutzy-Burkey hails from Amish country and once had a job tuning pipe organs.
And then there is the Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics, which has given Seattle rapper Sir Mix-A-Lot's hit "Baby Got Back" a nerdy makeover. Hence, the splendor of "Baby Got Stats" (.mp3).
I guess I should be thanking Freakonomics co-author and University of Chicago professor of economics Steven D. Levitt for turning me onto this tune via his blog, but I'm going to hold off until I can get the lyrics (My mentors tried to warn me / But those odds ratios get me so horny) out of my head.
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