You don’t need to be a historian to know that song lyrics have changed an awful lot in the last half century. With the emphasis really being on ‘awful’.
From Elvis Presley singing “Your lips excite me/let your arms invite me” in 1960 (on ‘It’s Now Or Never) to Robin Thicke threatening “I’ll give you something big enough to tear your ass in two” on last year’s ‘Blurred Lines’, the general consensus is that song lyrics haven’t gotten filthier, less subtle, and traded in sentimentality for sexual edge.
Savvy internet artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm wanted to test that very hypothesis, tracking the popularity of certain words in song lyrics over the last 50 years, tracing how some terms fell in and out of favour.
“I had a feeling (as do a lot of people), that songs these days are a lot about sex, in a very blatant way,” Lamm tells The Huffington Post of his song lyrics project, titled Money, Love And Sex. “I also had a feeling that songs back in the day were more about love. So, I decided to see if this was true.”
Analysing US pop charts, specifically each year-end Billboard Hot 100 list from 1960 to 2013, Lamm produced a lyric database which led to a series of fascinating graphs that demonstrate how key words – from ‘love’ to ‘fuck’ – have been used in hits over the years. “I had a feeling that songs back in the day were more about love. So, I decided to see if this was true.”
Each column in the graph represents a year with the songs sorted from #1 to #100 top to bottom, while each song is represented by a coloured rectangle, the darker the colour – from light blue to crimson – the greater the frequency of that particular word.
“The more red a song is, the more often that particular word appears appears in the song,” explains Lamm. “For example, if a song has five ‘love’ words and a total of 100 words in the entire song, that song is assigned 5% and a particular shade of color.”
So are the lyrics of popular music really getting dirtier?
Well, the below ‘Foul’ category – which includes all your typical cussing like ‘fuck’, ‘bitch’, ‘hoe’ etc. – shows a definite rise that increases incrementally from the 90s onwards after decades of clean cut Top 100 hits. Another interesting contrast that proves the ‘dirty’ evolution is the increase over time of the term ‘sexy’ while ‘happy’ decreases (with apologies to Pharrell).
But interestingly, there’s some music vernacular that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, with a number of song clichés – eg. ‘Baby’, ‘Money’, ‘Girls’ – showing an unwavering consistency from the 60s right through to the ’00s.
But most importantly, ‘Love’ remains the most consistently trodden lyrical territory in pop music over the years. In fact, the word appears in seven song titles in both 1960’s Hot 100 and 2013’s year-end list.
View the rest of the song lyric graphs – for terms like ‘Weed’, ‘Home’, ‘Lonely’, ‘Kiss’ and more – over at Huffington Post.
