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Hit songs are getting wordier
Average word count of top-ten songs during the 1960s: 176
Average last year: 436
That is from Harper's Index, August issue. I don't think it can be a pure length of song effect.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 14, 2008 at 04:54 PM in Music | Permalink
Comments
Rap pushing the word count?
Posted by: Toxic at Jul 14, 2008 4:59:41 PM
Hip hop and rap songs have more words.
Posted by: Jason at Jul 14, 2008 5:00:05 PM
The tempo of music has certainly soared.
Posted by: Chris at Jul 14, 2008 5:02:15 PM
We're a more articulate and verbal society, despite what the naysayer academics say.
Posted by: D at Jul 14, 2008 5:14:01 PM
Does "Fergalicious" count as a word?
Posted by: josh at Jul 14, 2008 5:30:32 PM
Do they count repeats of the same word? I recall a popular ditty from my school days where the phrase, "Drugs, Rock n'Roll, Badass...Vegas Hos, Late Night...Booty Calls--Shiny Disco Balls" was the entirety of the lyrics, only this was repeated for something on the order of five minutes.
Posted by: obs at Jul 14, 2008 5:37:14 PM
The influence of rap, undoubtedly.
Posted by: Ryan at Jul 14, 2008 5:49:06 PM
Not entirely related, but I saw a documentary featuring Paul McCartney talking about playing "Hey Jude" for George Martin (I think). Martin said, "No chart hit is over 4 minutes long," to which Paul replied, "This one is."
(Details are probably off, but the spirit of this anecdote is correct.)
Posted by: Bob Murphy at Jul 14, 2008 5:54:11 PM
Do backing vocals get included here?
Posted by: PFJ at Jul 14, 2008 6:05:42 PM
The capability of our brains to process language is getting faster.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jul 14, 2008 6:17:12 PM
As other commenters have said - have you heard of this thing called "rap music"? You see, it's quicker to speak words than it is to sing them...
Posted by: Lindemann at Jul 14, 2008 6:21:35 PM
"The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound."
They must have upgraded the software, that's all.
Posted by: Yuri at Jul 14, 2008 7:00:05 PM
Do they give a breakdown by genre? Or is it all songs against all songs, do synthesized vocals count? Could musicians be saying more and meaning less?
Posted by: Eric at Jul 14, 2008 7:44:00 PM
Hip-hop/rap for sure...rappers average about 2-3 verses (16 bars each) a song plus the chorus and sometimes a bridge. But who knows
Posted by: Samir at Jul 14, 2008 7:54:10 PM
Clearly rap.
Posted by: Andy at Jul 14, 2008 8:01:40 PM
totally based on my listening and (perhaps faulty) recall, but bands back in the day were more likely to repeat verses (nirvana did this, too, but they were a throwback in many ways). i guess i have to see if they were counting all words, or excluding repeats.
Posted by: dj superflat at Jul 14, 2008 9:55:07 PM
There are a variety of interesting analyses of pop songs over time that can be done, but it will take more time than I have to do them.
Posted by: Paul N at Jul 14, 2008 10:02:23 PM
We've entered a new baroque period.
Posted by: The other Eric at Jul 14, 2008 10:14:40 PM
Top-ten just doesn't mean what it used to, you'd be hard pressed to name any of the songs in it. Music is too fragmented now, too many niches, it's almost as fragmented as the book bestseller list. There's no longer any "song of the summer" that dominates radio airplay (does radio even play music anymore?) and takes you back when you hear it again years later, unlike hit summer movies which still have that effect.
It's not just the rappers though; angsty female singers have high word counts too. What hath Alanis wrought?
Re: Hey Jude. The "na na na na" part at the end is actually longer chronologically than the first part of the song; try timing it if you don't believe it. I wonder if each "na" counts as a word.
Posted by: at Jul 14, 2008 10:33:46 PM
I blame Twista.
Posted by: Jesse Rouse at Jul 14, 2008 11:50:36 PM
On the other hand, I heard somewhere that contempo movies have about 1/3 fewer dialogue words in them than movies of the past did. More action accounts for some of this, of course. But it's apparently also a function of the fact that contempo actors generally can't read dialogue as fast as actors used to be able to.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Jul 15, 2008 12:36:52 AM
Could that be an artifact of the 1960s, rather than a reflection on trends in the present? How would the word count compare to the classic songs of the 1930s and 40s? The "yeah yeah yeah" choruses of the 1960s define the early rock of that era and, it seems to me, represent a move away from the more articulate big band era.
Posted by: Erin at Jul 15, 2008 1:16:27 AM
Songs are getting longer, now that they're not defined by the 3-minute length of recording media. The hit songs of the 1960s were all 2:xx long--nowadays the hits are 4:xx long.
I wouldn't underestimate the song length effect.
Posted by: jb at Jul 15, 2008 1:34:41 AM
"I recall a popular ditty from my school days where the phrase, "Drugs, Rock n'Roll, Badass...Vegas Hos, Late Night...Booty Calls--Shiny Disco Balls" was the entirety of the lyrics"
I had never heard this song before. I looked it up on YouTube and am now enthralled. Thank you!
Posted by: Jacqueline at Jul 15, 2008 1:44:07 AM
Has to be the rap/hip-hop factor.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Jul 15, 2008 7:45:39 AM
