Leaving aside the ancient question of whether art imitates life or life imitates art, are there some concepts so firmly rooted in collective human belief systems that they remain constant across time? Popular music is on the forefront of what the people consider new and cool, but it can also reflect shared values that are more persistent, even timeless. Only recently has the abundance of storage and computational capacity made it feasible to study music’s messages empirically. Over most of the history of cultural musicology, research was hampered by the lack of available data.Īnd when songs themselves became data stored on Compact Discs, the computing power necessary to conduct analysis was being devoted to other uses.

Moreover, one might speculate that lyrics may have a higher tendency to be formulaic or even clichéd, making them more amenable to pattern analysis than prose generally. Lyrics can have attributes that would be out of place in literature or formal prose, such as repetition, rhyming, and rhythmic delivery. Studying song lyrics is different than general sentiment analysis of, say, a culture’s literature. We studied the third ingredient, words, which have received comparatively less attention. In recent years, considerable effort has been devoted to studying and classifying two of the three basic ingredients of music: tones and rhythms. It has long been recognized that studying a culture’s popular music can yield insight into its values and mood, but until recently analysis was confined to subjective examination of small samples. This project aims to discover the meaningful messages about cultures and their times, as revealed by the lyrics of popular music. Music may tell us what the artist wants to say, but popular music tells us what the people want to hear.Īnd that can tell us much about who they are. Over 15 songs are covers or remakes of songs already in the data set.Offensive word use dramatically increased in the 1990s and continued to grow rapidly into the 2000s.

Over 55% of the artists in our data set had only one top charting song.

Word repetition in top charting songs has been increasing over the decades.

Git it lyrics