Pop Science: Serious Answers to Deep Questions Posed in Songs

A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist uses data, facts, and science to deliver hilarious, fascinating answers to some of the most famous questions in pop music history.
 
“Is there life on Mars? Where have all the flowers gone? Pop songs can pose excellent questions and James Ball has given them the answers they deserve.”—The Times (UK)
 
Some of the most famous questions of our time have come to us in pop songs. “What is love?” “How soon is now?” “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” But do you know the answers?
 
Breaking down lyrics from Bob Dylan, Queen, Rihanna, the Ting Tings, Billy Joel, and a variety of other genre- and decade-spanning artists with colorful graphs and Venn diagrams,Pop Science reveals the exact points where lowbrow pop culture and the highest science and philosophy meet. By revealing the economic status of doggies in windows, what war is good for, and what becomes of the brokenhearted, James Ball uncovers what we have always known—that pop music is the key to life itself.

James Ball has worked in political, data, and investigative journalism for the Guardian, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post in a career spanning TV, digital, print, and alternative media. His reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize for public service, the Scripps Howard Prize, the British Journalism Award for investigative reporting, the Royal Statistical Society Award, and the Laurence Stern Fellowship, among others. He lives in London.