7

Van Halen's "Panama" Forced Dictator Manuel Noriega To Surrender

You'd never guess it from the title, but "Panama" is not actually about the country, the canal, or the hat. David Lee Roth was angry that critics had accused him of only ever singing about sex, partying, and cars, when he had clearly never written a song about a car! In order to achieve the trifecta for which he was already famous, he composed a song about one he'd seen race in Las Vegas, called "Panama Express." The song hit No. 13 on the Billboard Top 100 and became one of Van Halen's most famous anthems.

That might have been it, but five years later, the U.S. decided to invade the actual country. This was one of those confusing invasions where we used to support the guy we were now trying to take down, General Manuel Noriega. The military called the invasion Operation Just Cause, in case there was any confusion over which side was morally justified. The plan to capture Noriega himself was called Operation Nifty Package, because even though you're launching an invasion, it doesn't mean you're above silly words like "nifty."

Greg Smith/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Operation Stridex clearly failed.

6

David Hasselhoff's "Looking For Freedom" Helped Bring Down The Berlin Wall

You can rarely say that David Hasselhoff was the reason behind anything's success. He was decidedly everyone's least-favorite part of Baywatch and the third-best thing in Knight Rider (after KITT and the evil version of himself). Still, by being in the right place at the right time, Hasselhoff, his ridiculous-even-for-the-1980s light-up leather jacket, and his music will forever be tied to directly helping bring down the Berlin Wall.

To be clear, Germans aren't nearly as fanatic about the Hoff as pop culture has led you to believe. They know of the stereotype, and they hate it. But they can't deny that for eight weeks in the summer of 1989, they made Hasselhoff's anthem "Looking For Freedom" the No. 1 song in what was then West Germany.

People in Communist East Germany heard the song as well, and even though the lyrics are actually about a son getting out from under the shadow of his rich father, they took it as a rallying cry -- or in the Hoff's words, as their "song of hope." A few months later, people started tearing down the wall with their bare hands. To thank him for his inspiring song, they invited Hasselhoff to sing there on New Year's Eve. One piano-key scarf later, and the rest is history.

ZDF
Or Hoffstory, if you will.

5

Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" Encouraged People To Do Just That In Serbia

"Fight The Power" is pretty clearly meant to be an African American anthem. It was written specifically for Spike Lee's film Do The Right Thing, and its lyrics make overt references to being black, specifically in America. Needless to say, it was a huge surprise when Eastern Europeans listened to the message at the heart of the song and said, "Yeah, us too."

In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia was a mess. (Spoiler Alert: Things didn't work, and even the name was split in the divorce.) The public was fed up with the rule of Slobodan Milosevic, president of the Serbian part, and his control over the state-run media. Since Milosevic came from the Soviet school of "Screw you, I'll do what I want," he wasn't really concerned about how the public felt.

Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
"Shut up or I'm changing the name to Miloslavia."

A huge protest was planned for March 9, 1991 in Belgrade. The president figured his police could just kick some protester butt, everyone would go home, and that would be it. But far more people turned up than expected. Estimates of the numbers vary, because it's hard to count into the tens of thousands while being tear-gassed, but they range from 70,000 to 150,000. Police efforts to disperse the crowd escalated until tanks were rolling onto the streets, and in the end, two people died, 203 were injured, and 636 were arrested.

4

The Howdy Doody Show Theme Song Kick-Started The Gay Rights Movement

While you might never have seen it, for our parents' and grandparents' generation, Howdy Doody was THE children's show. It ran on NBC from 1947 to 1960, and it was revolutionary. It was not only one of the first shows to use color, but it pioneered children's programming as a genre. Also, it had a lot of really freaking scary puppets.

For the people raised on the show, the theme song would have been as ubiquitous as, say, the Barney theme is today. And you know how much the Barney theme annoys you? Keep that in mind, because it is going to be important in a minute.

In the late 1960s, it was still basically illegal to be gay in this country. Police could raid a bar if they thought LGBT people hung out there, or a club if people of the same sex were dancing together.

Zagria/Wiki Commons
"Those stripes are too tasteful-looking. Call SWAT."

3

Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train" Helped Find 26 Missing Kids

Despite sounding depressing as all get-out, Soul Asylum's mega hit "Runaway Train" charted in 15 countries, including hitting No. 2 in the U.S. Knowing that the video would get heavy airplay, the band could have gone any direction with it. Instead, they decided to use it to do good. While the lyrics of the song are actually about the lead singer's battle with depression, the director of the video took the "runaway" part of the title more literally and highlighted children who were missing.

The video was tailored for each country in which it ran. For example, the U.K. version opened by saying there were "100,000 youths lost on the streets of Britain," while in the U.S., that number was one million. In order to have maximum impact, the children included were also from the areas in which each video was being played, so only missing Australian kids were shown in Australia, etc. While MTV cut it short because they worried that the appeal at the end made the video look like a public service announcement, the director figured it might make some kids return home because they had seen themselves in a cool music video.

Jason Kempin/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
"Music video?" -- MTV today

2

A Hamilton Song Helps a 210-Year-Old Orphanage

The smash hit musical Hamilton has done a lot of things. It has shown people that the founding fathers weren't as boring as their high school history class made them out to be. It has convinced whole new groups of people that Broadway musicals can actually be cool. And it inadvertently revived interest in a centuries-old orphanage in New York City.

The final song in the musical, "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story", mentions that Alexander Hamilton's widow, Elizabeth Schuyler-Hamilton, founded the first private orphanage in New York after her husband went and got himself shot by Aaron Burr. It was a fitting tribute for her husband, who lost his own parents at a young age. This was also an exceptionally badass thing for her to do, not just because it was so rare for a woman to be the deputy directory of anything in those days, but also because she didn't owe her husband anything. Despite being very good at making a new country, he'd been less good at marriage, and very publicly cheated on Elizabeth while he was alive and left her with so much debt she lost their house after he died.

"Sorry, I Suck At Vows" somehow didn't make the final soundtrack cut.

1

"Thunderstruck" By AC/DC Improves Chemotherapy

We all know that people fighting cancer are totally metal. They get up ready to kick that disease's ass every day, so if they want to walk around with a boom box blasting AC/DC, they should absolutely be allowed to. As it turns out, that might not be as crazy as it sounds, because rock music might actually make it easier to treat cancer.

OK, so it's more about some technical science stuff than intimidating tumors with the power of hard rock, but it's still really cool. Basically, chemotherapy uses particles that need to be coated in plasma before being used to attack whatever stupid cancer has taken hold. The standard ways of doing this usually make one side less coated than the other, and the treatment is therefore not as effective.

Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images
The results of coating the plasma in microscopic school boy outfits was deemed inconclusive.

But scientists at the University of South Australia took time out from finding antidotes to the venom of all the animals that want to kill them to blast some metal and call it conducting research. Amazingly, it worked. They discovered that if they set up a speaker and played rock music -- specifically, "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC -- while preparing the chemotherapy drug, the particles would bounce around and ensure a more even coating, leading to better outcomes. In fact, it resulted in a "markedly slower release" of the drug "ranging from 2-fold up to more than 100-fold," which means it can fight the cancer for longer.

And if AC/DC isn't your thing, other rock music probably works equally well. The scientists are hoping that they can get similar results using this method on other drugs, but who are they kidding, they will probably use their success as an excuse to try it on every experiment from here on out.

Deep inside us all behind our political leanings, our moral codes and our private biases, there is a cause so colossally stupid, we surprise ourselves with how much we care. Whether it's toilet paper position, fedoras on men or Oxford commas, we each harbor a preference so powerful we can't help but proselytize to the world. In this episode of the Cracked podcast, guest host Soren Bowie is joined by Cody Johnston, Michael Swaim and special guests to discuss the most trivial things we will argue about until the day we die. Get your tickets here!

Read about world-changing songs that got butchered in The 5 Worst Lyric Changes in Covers of Famous Songs, and learn about how one small wager established the field of nanotechnology in 5 Stupid Bets That Changed the World.

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