By Angela Becerra Vidergar

Amidst all the speculation about who would sing the new Bond song, Stanford scholars Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold wrote a breakdown of the potential crooners, correctly naming Sam Smith the 'consensus candidate.'

Daub and Kronengold had an edge over other predictors. They share a fascination with the 007 pop music canon that they've channeled into a new book, The James Bond Songs: Pop Anthems of Late Capitalism.

In the book, they tackle decades of "disposable pop music with a tradition," as Daub calls the Bond songs.

Through an exhaustive analysis of the musical and production qualities of the compositions, Daub says they found "examples of music reflecting societal trends, especially in regards to material fulfillment."

Kronengold notes that whether they were great or awful, the Bond songs "reflect and influenced feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money and aging," through references to iconic representations of greed, lust, luxurious lifestyles and, of course, shaken martinis.

An assistant professor of musicology, Kronengold says five decades of music makes the Bond canon "an interesting target for humanistic inquiry." He says the odd allure of the Bond music is that it maintains an underlying sameness "in an age when everything is changing faster than you can imagine."

Actor Daniel Craig, while making his first Bond film, Casino Royale, in Venice

Daub, an associate professor of German studies and author of several books on the place of music in society, says the paradox of change and consistency in the Bond songs makes them valuable tools for understanding the "changing conceptions of capital but also of labor" in capitalist society from roughly the end of World War II on to today.

The '60s Bond songs portray work as a means of changing the self while the '70s songs portray it as a job — you just show up and do it, Daub says. And by the '80s, "its basically — you show up and do it and you hope nobody notices that you're totally unqualified to do it."

To show how the Bond songs echo our changing relationship with work, the scholars looked closely at how artists and producers approached the task of making Bond songs.

In particular, Kronengold and Daub found that the creation and production of Bond songs offers a unique perspective on an aspect of the capitalist system called 'affective labor.'

In everyday terms, think of the idea of 'service with a smile.' Kronengold explains: "Affective labor is something that is bought and sold in the same way that other kinds of goods and services are bought and sold. So having to smile, to be charming, to kind of make people aware of your effort and appreciate it, is something that becomes equally important to the service that you're actually paid to provide."

Kronengold points to a story about Tom Jones singing the title song for the 1965 Thunderball film and "passing out in the studio at the end of the song because he held a high note for too long."

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