The Music Messaging System

Back in February 2014, the Huffington Post ran a story that caught my eye. It reported the findings of a music researcher named Nickolay Lamm who created frequency charts regarding the use of certain words in songs that charted as Billboard hits. He did this for tunes charting over the past 50 years, and what he found provided statistical proof of something most everyone has noticed on an anecdotal level: popular music is growing more lewd in its lyrical content.

The story seemed particularly important to me because I am constantly engaged in conversations with my 19-year old daughter over some of the music she listens to, notably the hip-hop I hear blasting from her room and her car speakers. To my ears, a lot of it is vulgar, superficial, misogynistic and just plain stupid, and that is not really okay with me. She argues that she doesn't pay any attention to the lyrics, really, that it is just the music and the beat that moves her, plus sometimes she finds it all quite funny. My concern is that her filtering brain does hear it all and perhaps without her conscious awareness it distills that music down into what the kids today call "memes" (mimed themes). These are important because they provide the fingerprints useful to investigations of what I believe has become a social crime scene.

To me, when we as a culture have become inured to the use of words like "nigger" and "ho" and "fuck", we have taken many steps closer to being a culture that has just given up on the hard work of living well, adhering to a quality standard. It seems to suggest that we expect no future.

A culture cannot use a thought or language police, because it wreaks of totalitarianism and it bows to the power of the words themselves. The problem with the latter is that there is a place in artistic expression for the use of loaded words, and in the hands of talented writers they are extremely powerful. But that is not who is cranking out the music messages in the world today. Instead it is the progeny of a couple generations of mutant offspring who are the direct result of the trends identified in Nickolay Lamm's study.

How do you express to a commercially successful creative type, for whom the synapses between social responsibility and common sense have not connected, that words matter beyond just making them rhyme, and certainly beyond reusing the most harmful among them because it is germane to the messages they are sending?

Like young Democrats who envision a future in which all the old Republicans have died off, perhaps those of us who yearn for a better culture must simply hope for an evolutionary development, an improvement. It doesn't appear to be headed that way, though. In fact, as this study below shows, we are headed backwards, like lunatics in a lust to rut. - RAR

Artist Traces The Vocabulary Of Music From The '60s To Today

It doesn't take a scientist to suspect that pop music's lyrics have become increasingly sexual as of late, with a majority of number one hits becoming almost nonsensical once they're censored down to radio-friendly levels. But we never knew exactly how drastically the vocabulary of music had changed... until now.

Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm investigated the matter with a project entitled "Money, Love and Sex," which delves into the trending lyrics of Billboard hits. Lamm tracks the popularity of certain key words in song lyrics, tracing how their use has expanded or declined over time.

"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 explained to The Huffington Post. "I also had a feeling that songs back in the day were more about love. So, I decided to see if this was true. I made a database of song lyrics, which took a very long time to fill, along with a program which analyzed this database. So, I just type in a word or phrase and it tells me which songs had these words and phrases and how often these words and phrases appeared in each song."

Lamm's graphs explore the fluctuating popularity of words including "home," "lonely," "weed" and "ass," creating an abstract portrait of the overt sexualization of contemporary music. In each graph, the horizontal axis represents the year the song was released and the vertical axis is the song's popularity according to Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles. "Each cell represents a song," explained Lamm. "The more red a song is, the more often that particular word appears appears in the song. 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."

Lamm's chosen words range from the sweet to the nasty, the emotional to the purely physical. While some, like "baby," remain relatively consistent from the '60s to the present, we clearly see "I love you" on the decline and the "foul" category -- which includes words like "fuck," "bitch," and "hoe"-- breaks onto the scene in the '90s. After perusing Lamm's fascinating glimpse into music history, it's safe to say pop lyrics have taken a turn for the dirtier. Take a look below and let us know if you find any of the results particularly shocking in the comments.

Summary of Findings

Presented here are the words used in the Huffington Post story on the study, which were only a sampling of the overall study. To provide a quick overview, ▲ indicates that we are getting a lot more of this word. ▼means we are getting a lot less of this word. ▲ indicates only slighter increased use, ▼ slightly less.

▲Sexy

▲We/Us

▼Sad

▼Happy

▼Love

▲Weed

▲Foul

▲Sex

▲Money

▲Baby

▲Kiss

▲Boys

▲Girls

▲Body

▲I Love You

▲Heart

▲Lonely

▼Home

▼Smile

▼Rain

▲Hate Kill

So what would this sampling of words seem to indicate about consumers of pop culture in 2014? It may tell us this about our inner feelings: We think about ourselves and about having sex with others a great deal, smoke pot, see the value in money and body image, and may entertain thoughts of hate or even desires to kill other people.

On the flip side, we are sort of out of touch with our less supercharged emotions, don't smile a lot, aren't real aware of our physical environment, and we don't have quite the attachment to the concept of "home" as did earlier consumers of pop culture.

My interpretation is open to further interpretation. - RAR