Only if you get the title right – it’s “Rime.” 
For some reason, robardin’s post about all of the errors in Billy the Kid reminds me of an article Steve Martin wrote for the New York Times or somesuch a couple years back while King Tut’s remains went on tour where he pointed out that his own song King Tut was full of errors- he was not born in Arizona, he did not have a condo made of stone-a, he never ate a crocodile, etc.
And also, because I’m a nitpicking fool, I have to point out that even though they popularized the songs, the two They Might Be Giants songs mentioned in the thread were not TMBG originals- Istanbul was a hit in the 1950s for The Four Lads, and Why Does The Sun Shine was originally from an old educational record.
The musical 1776 helped a lot of kids pass American history, I bet (it helped me!). Aside from the fictional encounter with Martha Jefferson, nearly everything in the script and libretto is factually accurate, and much of it is pulled from the letters and diaries of the people in question. “Molasses to Rum” is a neat geographical outline of the Triangle Trade, and “But Mr. Adams” reminds you of all the members of the Declaration Committee by giving them each a verse and rhyming their states’ names within that verse! (“I cannot write with any style or proper etiquette/I don’t know a participle from a predicate/I am just a simple cobbler from Connecticut.”)
I learned about naked mole rats from Errol Morris’s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Not exactly “popular” culture, but it was a work of entertainment whose point was not to educate folks about naked mole rats.
(By the way, I saw TMBG in concert a few years ago and they played “Why Does the Sun Shine” as a ramped-up punk song. It was terrific.)
I always remember Steve Martins bit from My Blue Heaven where he tells Rick Moranis that you never wear a suit jacket separate from the pants otherwise you’ll end up with a suit that doesn’t quite match.
When I saw the subject line, my first thought was their song “Alexander the Great”:
By the Aegian Sea
In 334 B.C.
He utterly beat the armies of Persia
There’s no way in hell I’d know what century he lived in if it weren’t for that song. 
We all know how influential True Romance has been in enlightening the general public on the topic of Southern Italian history…
:rolleyes:
I thought Eris , Godess of discord in Grim adventures, was a made up greek goddess until
I looked at another wikipedia article on Eris
Oh yea, well, you’re a canetlope.
And TMBG fans can find the original “Why does the sun shine” here: Singing Science Records
I know this isn’t much of a worthwhile example, but at least Gwen Stefani’s Hollaback Girl must have surely taught the ADHD-riddled youth of today how to spell ‘bananas’ correctly. No double Ns in sight!
As far as I recall, in the liner notes to the album with “Billy the Kid” Billy Joel wrote that “Billy the Kid wasn’t me, he was a boy I knew in Oyster Bay.”
I would have gone through life content to remember only the first two decimal places if it weren’t for a mock football cheer for the math department:
Secant, tangent, cosine, sine
3.14159
Yay, team!
Most people know their Miranda rights from cop shows: “You have the right to remain silent…”
This isn’t really “popular” culture but knowing that Oliver Cromwell was born in 1599 and died in 1658 really helped me with my English History dates, both in social studies and literature classes. This is from a Monty Python song about Oliver Cromwell called…“Oliver Cromwell”
I think “Holy Grail” also helped me get through Authurian legends in English Lit in 10th grade.
According to an episode of StarGate: Atlantis, tomatos are not only not deadly, but they are in fact quite tasty.
Stargate and Babylon 5 are both indirectly responsible for me learning all sorts of stuff because I’d look it up online (for B5, I’d look up names of ships like EAS Aggamemnon, and for StarGate, lots of character names, including aliens like Ra and Anubis, and some of the humans like Daniel, are references to ancient legends and stories.
Also, thanks to Boondock Saints, I know that Charlie Bronson always needs rope, assault guys crawling through the vents never happens in real life (and in fact, only happens in bad television), and I also know how to say “The Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit” in Latin.
[Pedant]It’s Rime, not Rhyme: a coating or encrustation, usually of frost or ice. [/Pedant]
Which is also a variant spelling of “rhyme.”
Sorry, twickster beat you to it. 
Which is neither the spelling in the name of the poem nor in the name of the song. Regardless of what the word means, “rime” is correct.
Obviously, of course, they are both from the same Greek root, and in fact these two spellings were often used interchangably by early English prosodists, though some made the distinction that has come to be standard in our own time that ‘rhyme’ is the matching of similar-sounding syllables and ‘rime’ is the use of accent as the chief determinant of a poem’s rhythm (also from the same Greek root).
A lot of people warn me about the pounds of undigested red meat I must have in my colon. I always say, “Yes, I love *Beverly Hills Cop * too!”