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So I’m currently editing some new data that I’m looking forward to analyzing: lyrics from about 150 popular songs that describe nuclear warfare, extramarital affairs, body-shaming, public intoxication, arming young children with guns, animal abuse, child abuse, and acts of violence (including murder) taken toward neighbors and officers of the law. Yep, it’s the Billboard year-end Hot 30 and 35 lists from 1946-1950.

Sure, it’s got some of the sappy and, often, beautiful songs one would expect from that era, and it also presents more than enough xenophobic, racist, and sexist attitudes, but it also refers to the topics above, among others, and one song from the collection is even named for the future wife of a Beatle and herself a member of the 1970s rock band Wings.

There is plenty of language of interest in the collection to keep a linguist busy , including lots of Spanish and some Italian, some representations of Southern American and African American English, as well as some attempt at “Beatnik English.” A couple of my favorite linguistic features appear very frequently in the collection, namely a-prefixing and ain’t, which should give me reason to revisit those features and their use in pop music, as it is high time that I should do that.

The collection is also noteworthy for the number of times the same songs occur throughout a given year or two. For instance, 1946 has about 10 songs that appear as multiple versions in the top 35, one by as many as four different artists. This actually presents another area of interest for the linguist, as lyrics differ from version to version, some subtly, say by a insertion or a replacement of a pronoun or an adverb here or there, or an added line, but others much more radically, with different verses, or differences in verse and chorus ordering, or in the absence or presence of introductions.

Been thinking a lot about New York lately, and I thought I would take a look at my Billboard year-end top ten collection (1951-2019) and see what songs could be rounded up using the search terms: New York, the Big Apple, Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Long Island, Staten Island, Empire State, Harlem, Madison Square Garden, Central Park, Times Square, and Broadway. In total, 19 songs emerged, and here I present one for each of the decades from the 1960s to the 20teens in reverse chronological order:

The other songs that the search resulted in are “Surfin’ U.S.A.”, “Staying Alive”, “Maria, Maria”, “Smooth”, “Rumpshaker”, “In Da Club”, “Lean Back”, “Give Me Everything”, “We Are Young”, “Harlem Shake”, “Can’t Hold Us”, “Talk Dirty”, and “That’s What I Like”.

A couple of my personal favorite songs that mention New York but are not in the collection (although the second occurs in the Billboard year-end Top 30 collection for 2010) are:

What with my move to Kentucky at the end of January, getting used to a new job and setting, and the onset of the current pandemic, I finally got around to taking a look at the lyrics of the Billboard year-end Top Ten from 2019. This review is similar to that of 2018, in that, what I find most of all in these lyrics is less, especially when comparing to 2017. Fewer instances, for example, of the n-word (2 times in 1 song) and of bitch (5 times in 2 songs). Absolutely no Spanish. “Like” does appear 50 times, but that is less than half what it occurred last year, when I pronounced it word of the year in 2018 pop music. In fact, there is really no word that pops out as word of the year in the 2019 collection.

The year 2019 does have a fair amount of name-dropping, although, in keeping with this review’s theme, it occurs less than it does in the most recent years. It generally falls into three categories: trade names, placenames, and the names of people or groups of people. In the first category, there are 15 trade names dropped in 4 songs (“Old Town Road”, “Seven Rings”, “Sicko Mode”, and “Wow”. These trade names are Porsche, Maserati, Fendi, Marlboro (although this could also be said to be about a person: Marlboro Man), Black Card, Nike, Remy, Goose, Facetimed, Xan (2), Forbes, LaCroix, and Lambo, as well as the models G-Wagen (Mercedes Benz) and 720S (McLaren). The placenames occur in three of these four songs (“Old Town Road”, “Seven Rings”, and “Sicko Mode”), and they are Rodeo (Drive), Bonnaroo (or the name of a music festival, but one that occurs in the same place every year), and Tiffany’s (although this too could be said to be the title of a work of art, specifically “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”. Finally, the names of people or groups of people, most of them celebrities, and more specifically, other rap artists, occur in two of the four songs that we discussed with respect to trade names: “Sicko Mode” and “Wow”. These names are La Flame, Stacey Dash, Chase B., Jamba Juice, Uncle Luke, Tay Keith, Jesus Christ, Sheck, Book, Lizzy, La Ferrari, Fall Out Boy, Dumbo, Mutombo, Lil Troy, and Prescott. Also, Mary, as in “Hail Mary”.

With tonight’s harvest moon on the rise, I thought it would be a good time to look at the word “moon” in pop music. However, I had basically already done that in my celebration of the first man to walk on the surface of the moon in a blog that I posted on July 30, 2017, and a search on my updated corpus reflecting songs from 2017 and 2018 provided only one additional variant: moon, in 2017’s “Something Just Like This.” Thus, what follows is a reposting of my earlier entry.

In the search I did on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016) at that time, I ran words associated with space travel, namely variants of Apollo, astronaut, moon, rocketship, and spaceship). Among other things, I wanted to see if there might have been a higher use of the terms during the 1960s, as the United States engaged in its space race with the U.S.S.R., by examining their occurrence in songs . And I wanted to add to my previous post on planets toward a fuller account of space imagery in pop music.

However, the search revealed no occurrences of either Apollo or astronaut in the collection, and spaceship and rocketship occurred in only one song apiece (respectively, 2009's "Boom Boom Pow" and 2016's "Stressed Out").

The search for variants of moon in the collection fared much better, however, with 74 hits in a total of 34 songs. The results range from the bare form to compounds such as moonlight and moonbeam, as illustrated in table 1.

As shown, the bare form of moon appeared in the greatest number of songs and the most overall, while compounds and other variant forms appear fewer times. While some of these words, namely mooned, moonshine, and moonwalking, have an indirect link with the moon itself, their occurrence in the collection was seldom enough that they were left in the analysis by decade, as illustrated in table 2.

As the table shows, moon variants actually appear most frequently in the 1950s, followed by the 1990s, and are least frequently used in the 1980s, followed by the 2000s and the 1960s. In other words, moon appears in songs more often in the decade leading up to the decade of the initial moon landing than it does in the decade of the landing itself. One has to wonder about this outcome: Could it be that the moon was such a focal point in other forms of media in the 1960s that it was virtually ignored, or even avoided, by pop musicians at the time because it might be considered too cliche by audiences? Or perhaps the moon was simply disregarded in favor of lyrics about the Vietnam War, the civil rights struggle in America, and other concerns of the time. Answering such questions will require more analysis of the lexical inventory of the collection. In the meantime, enjoy a "moon song" from each decade:

This time of year, I find myself thinking of the beach quite a bit, given how hot it is in this part of the country this time of year, but also because the days of summer are counting down, at least to the Yankee calendar I still adhere to at times. So, I thought it was high time to see what the status of beaches were in pop music. A search for variants of the word beach in songs from Billboard’s year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2018) results in 11 hits from 8 songs, including three times in which the word is used in a proper noun: Redondo Beach, Saint Thomas Beach, and Venice Beach. The songs that use the word are as follows (in chronological order):

As a way of celebrating today's ghoulish holiday, in this post I summarize my earlier posts that have mentioned Halloween, in both musical lyrics and the Rocky Mountain atlss work, as well as in the Reddit Corpus.

With today marking the anniversary of the creation of NASA and July 20th the anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first man to walk on the surface of the moon, I was prompted to take a look at a small group of words associated with space travel (namely, variants of Apollo, astronaut, moon, rocketship, and spaceship) in pop music. Among other things, I wanted to see if there might have been a higher use of the terms during the 1960s, as the United States engaged in its space race with the U.S.S.R., by examining their occurrence in songs on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). And I wanted to add to my previous post on planets toward a fuller account of space imagery in pop music.

The search revealed no occurrences of either Apollo or astronaut in the collection, and spaceship and rocketship occurred in only one song apiece (respectively, 2009's "Boom Boom Pow" and 2016's "Stressed Out").

The search for variants of moon in the collection fared much better, however, with 74 hits in a total of 34 songs. The results range from the bare form to compounds such as moonlight and moonbeam, as illustrated in table 1.

As shown, the bare form of moon appeared in the greatest number of songs and the most overall, while compound and other variant forms appear fewer times. While some of these words, namely mooned, moonshine, and moonwalking, have an indirect link with the moon itself, their occurrence in the collection was seldom enough that they were left in the analysis by decade, as illustrated in table 2.

Ever since the running of the 143rd Kentucky Derby last week, been wondering how variants of horses fared in my data collections, aside from an earlier post I wrote on variants of male horses that were provided by informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. I turned my sights toward the Billboard year-end Top Ten collection, using target search terms such as horse, pony, colt, and bronco.

In all, the search on the 660 songs in the collection resulted in 17 hits in 8 songs, including what appear to be literal references to real-life horses and figurative references, such as dark horse. Of the five variants, the most frequent was horse(s), which appeared nine times in four songs, and included the compounds wild horses and dark horse, as in the songs featured below:

The remaining four variants occurred in only one song each, with only one variant, pony, appearing more than once in the respective song.

Following on previous posts on sports idioms and references to basketball in popular music, and, more importantly, in honor of Jackie Robinson Day, this post takes a look at baseball references in songs from Billboard's year-end Top 30 charts (1951-2016).

Of the terms that were investigated, only a few appear multiple times: home run appears in two songs ("Wild Ones" and "My House"); shortstop in two songs ("Dilemma" and "Right Thurr"); and (Joe) DiMaggio (the only baseball star's name found in the collection) also appears in two songs ("Mrs. Robinson" and "Vogue").

The following terms appear in one song each: Louisville Slugger ("Before He Cheats"); major league ("My Way"), pitcher's mound ("Good Feeling"); and swing your bat ("Bang Bang").

One thing to be learned from this investigation is that, having done three of the songs presented here, Flo Rida apparently loves the game -- or at least the imagery -- of baseball.

For a word search on the terms found here, click here.

In this post, I take a look at instances of the word coast in pop music, specifically those cases in which it refers to the edge of land near a large body of water. To do so, I ran the words coast (and its morphological variants) and seaboard on lyrics of songs making up Billboard's year-end Top Thirty charts (1951-2016). The results were 39 hits in 12 songs from the collection.

Of the search terms that were used, only the bare form coast was found in the collection. I divided the instances of this word into two categories: generic references and proper nouns. The generic references represented the smaller of the two sets, with "American Pie" and "No Scrubs" including one token apiece, and two tokens appearing in the following:

Among the proper nouns, there is one reference to Gold Coast in "Brown Sugar" and two instances of Golden Coast, apparently in reference to America's West Coast in this song:

The remaining songs (n=9) include references only to the East Coast and the West Coast (there were no references to the Left Coast, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, etc.). Three songs refer to the East Coast only ("Motownphilly", "Soldier", "Low Life"), and three to the West Coast only ("My Life", "How Do You Want It/California Love", "California Gurls"). The last three songs of the group include references to both East Coast and West Coast:

Big night in college basketball has me thinking about basketball references in popular music. A search of terms associated with basketball (including players, teams, shot names, etc.) on the Billboard year-end Top Thirty collection revealed the following songs (in chronological order):

During the last week, I've posted on variants of "sunrise" and "sunset" that were provided by informants of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), a dialectological survey of rural communities in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. For this post, I ran the one-word responses provided by LAMR informants, including sunrise, dawn, and daybreak, as well as their variant forms, such as sunrises and dawned, on lyrics from songs on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016). The results are illustrated in the figure below:

As illustrated, forms of dawn appear most often, in terms of both # of songs and total # of instances. Following are twilight, sunset, and sunrise. Variants such as daybreak and sundown were not found in this exercise, although this would probably not be the case for larger collections of songs.

As for the songs that included each of the terms, they were as follows: Dawn appears in "Vaya con Dios" (1953); "Sunshine of your Love" (1968); "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy" (1979); "Hands to Heaven" (1988); "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" (1988); "Baby Got Back" (1992); and "Dreamlover" (1993); and dawning in "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine in" (1969). Twilight appears in "My Prayer" (1956) and "Kiss Me" (1999). Sunset appears in "Candle in the Wind 1997" (1998) and as a street name in "Surfin' USA" (1963). Sunrise appears in "The Candy Man" (1972). 

In a post last week, I presented data on lexical variation for "sunset" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies in response to Daylight Savings Time rearing its ugly head once again. This week, I take a look at lexical variation for "sunrise" in the same collection. The results for a prompt approximating "What do you call it when the sun comes up?" are presented in the figure below:

As the figure shows, sunrise was the most common response to the question, followed by dawn, sunup, and then several low-frequency items. Compared to the earlier list of "sunset" variants, the list of "sunrise" variants is long, but this may be an effect of "sunset" being the second of the two prompts, and thus informants being primed as to what the fieldworker was looking for. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that in response to this prompt informants offered dawn as the second-ranking response rather than sunup, whereas sundown and dusk are the second- and third-ranking responses, respectively, for the "sunset" question. Furthermore, although neither dawn nor dusk challenge the leading variants for their respective questions, dawn is offered a relatively substantial number of times for "sunrise" (n=9), while dusk is only offered three times for "sunset."

With the recent passing of the great Chuck Berry, I've been hearing the term rock and roll being used a bit more than usual in the past few days, not only because of Berry's pivotal role in the early days of rock and roll but because of his classic song "Rock and Roll Music." Today, also marks the anniversary of Joan Jett's "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" topping the Billboard pop charts in 1982. With this in mind, I decided to conduct a search of the term in the lyrics of the songs that populate Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2016).

In all the phrase occurs 34 times in 9 of the 660 songs of the collection. It appears in songs in every decade of the collection, except for the 1960s and 1990s, and is especially pervasive in the early 1980s, where it appears in three songs: "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" (1980); "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" (1980); and the aforementioned "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" (1982). The other songs the phrase appears in are "The Rock and Roll Waltz" (1956); "Maggie May" (1971); "American Pie" (1972); "Play that Funky Music" (1976); "Boom Boom Pow" (2009); and "Party Rock Anthem" (2011).

Among the many tunes that didn't necessarily chart but include the phrase rock and roll, here are a few classics:

Day 5, 6 or whatever of Daylight Savings Time 2017, and I've yet to get a decent night's sleep. But it's all good, since we endure this madness for the children or the farmers or to save energy or some other noble cause to be sure. Anyway, it gives me a chance to look at lexical variation for different times of the day, which I haven't done since looking at "clock" in popular music and quarter forms for telling time in the Rocky Mountains.

I begin by presenting responses to a prompt by fieldworkers of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies for terms that informants used to describe the sun passing below the horizon at the end of the day.

As illustrated in Figure 1, the most common response was sunset (n=41) followed by a secondary variant, sundown (n=12). The remaining 5 response types occur only 9 times total.