"God put the needle on the disc of Saturn / The record he played revealed blueprints and patterns," he rapped in his signature rhythmic baritone, offering a taste from his forthcoming album, "Dark Matter," an exploration of the cosmos filtered through the mind of a rapper known among his peers as "the Genius."

Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

GZA, with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium, in Mr. Tyson's office at the Museum of Natural History.

Informed by meetings with top physicists and cosmologists at MIT and Cornell University, "Dark Matter" is intended to be the first in a series of albums that GZA—born Gary Grice in Brooklyn in 1966—will put out in the next few years, several of which are designed to get a wide audience hooked on science.

This is awesome. Album drops this fall:

Despite have left school in the 10th grade, GZA nurtured his affection for science as he developed his skills as a lyricist.

"There were certain things that grabbed my interest, such as photosynthesis, such as us living off plants and plants living off us," he said. "You look at everything in that light—so if I'm looking at ice cubes, I might start thinking about absolute zero, or Fahrenheit and Celsius. There's so much that can make me think about science."

How many rappers talk like that? Very few!