Shown Their Work/Music: Difference between revisions

* [[They Might Be Giants]] has tons of songs like this, like "Meet James Ensor" and "James K. Polk".

** When [[Science Marches On|science marched on]] past their well-known cover of "Why Does The Sun Shine? (The Sun Is A Mass Of Incandescent Gas)," they wrote a follow-up song with corrections.

** ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'', named for the poem of the same name, is a mostly accurate, if abridged, telling of the tale. It includes several direct quotations- sometimes entire verses, sometimes single lines, or phrases, dropped into the other lyrics.

** And a couple other songs refer to literary works, usually with surprising accuracy..."Brave New World" comes to mind.

** There's also "Alexander The Great", which mentions the Scythians falling by the River Jaxartes...

* ''Animaniacs'' did this quite a bit between "The Presidents Song" (US Presidents in order), "Wakko's America" (US states and their capitols), "Yakko's World" (all the nations), "Yakko's Universe" (showing the relative size of the universe), "The Flame" (a gentle re-telling of how Jefferson wrote the US Declaration of Independence, with another episode re-telling the tale of Paul Revere, and still another about Francis Scott Key writing The Star Spangled Banner), "The Planets Song" (the planets in our solar system), "The Ballad of Magellan" and "Bones in the Body", slipping some actual facts into amusing episodes.

* The albums ''Michigan'' and ''Illinois'' by [[Sufjan Stevens]] are filled with references to their respective namesakes. Initially, Sufjan claimed that he was planning similar albums ''all fifty US states'', but he's since given up on that (if he was ever serious to begin with).