Last September to December, I took an introductory class on computer software R, and the instructors used the below table in one of their slides to illustrate an example of good charts. I however, was struck by it for a completely different reason.
David Taylor created this 2014 award-winning chart (first published at www.prooffreader.com but chart has since been taken down from source 😕) highlighting the top words in Billboard popular song titles from 1890 to 2014.
Take a look at the more recent decades:
I mean...😒
It is mind-blowing that popular song titles in the 2000s (and all past decades) had zero curse words, but suddenly they burst to the top only a decade later. To be fair, since this table was published in 2014, the data for the 2010s is incomplete. A full analysis of the entire decade might yield different results.
But for at least 3 years, words such as "Hell", "F***", and "Die" were the most frequently used words in Billboard song titles.
So classy, right...
I don't know what happened that caused this change but I'm not surprise. In fact, this table only provides proof to a theory I have -- Western pop songs have increasingly become a cesspool of highly vulgar and explicit lyrics since the 2000s. It is ridiculous that I have to google "clean version" or "radio edit version" of so many songs now. Even young up-and-coming singers swear in their songs like it's not a big deal.
I fear for the day when we stop having "radio edit" versions available because we have become so desensitised to such vulgarity and explictiness.
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