Long before "punk rock" meant anything beyond the Jets and the Sharks:
- Johnny Mathis looked at applications of probability ("Chances Are", 1957);
- The Kingston Trio examined the connection between tax policy and Hamiltonian circuits ("M.T.A.", 1959);
- The Marcels analyzed low frequency events ("Blue Moon", 1961, remaking a song written in 1934!);
- Martha and the Vandellas warned us about global warming ("Heat Wave", 1963);
- Herman's Hermits warned us about violating capacity constraints ("Dandy", 1966: "Two girls are too many, three's a crowd and four you're dead!");
- Dionne Warwick discussed route-finding problems ("Do You Know the Way to San Jose", 1968).
Update: Since Marc-André Carle brought up geometry, I feel obligated to point out that geometry begins with basic shapes:
- The Diamonds (1953-present);
- The Cyrkle (1961-1968).
There is also a new tendency in some progressive rock / metal bands to get names inspired by geometry. I didn't compile a list, but the most patent example is probably the band TesseracT, named after the 4-dimension regular hypercube. For a sample of their music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkxRV4X1vLU
ReplyDeleteIt's rather ironic that a band named after a regular polytope would use so many nonstandard musical structures such as polyrhythm in their music.
TesseracT may well have the highest-dimensional name. Before the current trend to geometric names, there was Ice Cube (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cube) ... but note the update I made to the post for some earlier geometric groups.
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