We here at Tone Deaf are big fans of statisticians, professional and amateur alike. Over the years, they’ve provided us with countless hours of entertainment and frankly incredible music data. We revel in the knowledge that someone is out there quantifying how many times Eminem said “fuck” in the ’90s and how it corresponds to Grand Final winners.
But we must say, we get overjoyed when a code-savvy math whizz applies his very particular set of skills to something we’ve suspected all along. Case in point, blogger and self-described “geek and nerd, yet never dork” David Taylor has once again proven that pop music is getting dumber by the decade.
This time around, Taylor has taken a look at the song titles of Billboard hits throughout the decades. According to his blog, Taylor’s interest was piqued while listening to a string of ’30s and ’40s hits on his iPod, whose titles all began with “in” (‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’, ‘In the Still of the Night’, and so on).
Well, as readers can see in Taylor’s graph below, song titles these days aren’t offering much in the way of variety either, though they certainly don’t resemble those of the 1930s and ’40s. As Consequence of Sound notes, not only are they less specific, but we’re finding new ways to shorten them down to just a few letters.
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To take an example, while 1.1 percent of all popular songs released in the 1910s contained the word “gems”, 1.1 percent of all popular songs in the 2000s contained the word, or letter, rather, “U”. And while we loved “twistin'” in the ’60s, now we all get down to the sound of someone saying “yeah”.
If you needed anymore proof that popular music is getting more monosyllabic, just check out this side by side comparison of the key words in Billboard hits from the 1970s vs the 2000s: “Woman / Disco / Rock / Music / Dancin’” sounds far more impressive than “U / Like / Breathe / It / Ya”.
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However, Taylor notes that part of the reason song titles feature less words these days is because as the decades rolled on it became increasingly unnecessary to include the genre of a song in its title. Look at today’s chart, you don’t see a whole lot of ‘X Polkas’ or ‘X Boogies’, do you?
Readers can head on over to Prooffreader for more interesting tidbits, like the fact that the 2010s are the most vulgar years yet for song titles, or that many of the decades can be made into intelligible, five-word sentences, like, “Hell Yeah, We Die, Fuck!” (2010s).
Image via Prooffreader
