3.11.09

On Popular Music and Lyrics

Someone needs to do a comprehensive study of how often certain words are used in the popular songs of various eras throughout the history of popular music, and which words most frequently occur in the top 100 or so songs over the years at different points in time. It would be interesting to see whether there is any pattern to the occurrence of certain words in songs that resonate with the general public at different points in time, aside from the obvious ones ("love," "time," "baby," etc.) - although it would be interesting to see how frequently these occur, too, and to then look at what was going on politically and culturally at the point at which, say, the word "gone" is most frequently occurring. I suspect that a lot of it is arbitrary, and that a lot of it remains somewhat consistent (because certain things just always have and always will resonate with human beings), but it would be interesting to see how the influence of an economic recession or depression or the influence of war or assassination changed the poetry of the most popular music of that time. I'm not saying that the most popular music would be the best music; but if the study just focused on the songs that were most listened to and requested, the resulting data would say something about the majority of human beings, which might be interesting even if it centered around some shitty music.

Someone also needs to write an entire book, complete with a plot, comprised only of lyrics from songs that meant something in some way to the author, or which were somehow lyrics that the author was aware of in some capacity.

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