I just finished listening to The Age of Fracture, a 2014 album by a London-based band called CYMBALS. Musically, it wasn’t distinguishable from a million other synth-heavy indie bands, but the reason it caught my attention in the first place is that it’s nominally based on political scientist Daniel Rodgers’ 2012 book of the same name. It’d be pretty tendentious to try to draw connections between the musical style and Rodgers’ book, which (I’m told) is about the growing social and political rifts in the post-War western world. Maybe the lyrics were more thematically apposite, but I couldn’t find them online anywhere and have a rare condition where I’m totally unable to decipher sung words. But the album did get me thinking about other works of political science that deserve musical adaptations. Some nominees:

James Scott, Seeing Like a State – this feels like a gimme for some aspiring art-rock band; given Scott’s predilection for colorful metaphor and examples drawn from across the globe, there’s a ton of raw material for lyrics here. Scott is so discursive, though, that maybe this would be better adapted by a jazz trio or a jam band. Either way, to fit the theme of the book, the album should definitely resist genre labels as vehemently as healthy woodlands resist “scientific forestry” or villagers resist High Modernist urban planning.

Robert O. Self, American Babylon – several bands have already used this as an album title, so perhaps one of those albums could be retconned or reinterpreted to tell the story of race and power in the mid-20th century East Bay. I’m mostly including this because it’s one of my favorite political science books of the last decade and because “Babylon” is always a great lyrical touchstone (see Steely Dan and Vampire Weekend) – – it’s evocative and it just scans so well.

Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld – Gambetta’s book about the rituals and symbols that criminals use to communicate with each other is sociology, not political science. I suspect it popped into my head because 1. it’s on my bookshelf at eye-level, and 2. the name resembles Wynton Marsalis’ Black Codes (From the Underground). Still, it’s a fascinating book that would provide a band with plenty of material, especially since Gambetta himself rarely goes more than a few pages without a reference to popular culture (Goodfellas, The Long Goodbye, and the Godfather trilogy among many others). Unspoken codes and unsavory characters both make for great lyrical storytelling; maybe the Decembrists could do it justice.

Other suggestions?