A Linguistic Analysis of Sexual Content and Emotive Language in Contemporary Music Genres

Hart, Casey; Day, George J.

doi:10.1007/s12119-019-09645-z

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…In a study limited to the year 2009, the top 10 song charts were shown to be more likely to contain sexual content if compared to songs from the same album by the same artist that did not enter the top 10 [31]. According to previous studies, we also found an higher fraction of songs containing sexist content among Hip hop and R&B and soul songs [32,16], albeit other genres are not exempted from this trend [33]. Hip hop and R&B and soul were also found to display an increasing trend in associating competence more frequently to men than women [18].…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

Betti¹,

Abrate²,

Kaltenbrunner³

2022

Preprint

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We employ Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse 377,808 English song lyrics from the "Two Million Song Database" corpus, focusing on the expression of sexism across five decades and the measurement of gender biases. Using a sexism classifier, we identify sexist lyrics at a larger scale than previous studies using small samples of manually annotated popular songs. Furthermore, we reveal gender biases by measuring associations in word embeddings learned on song lyrics. We find sexist content to increase across time, especially from male artists and for popular songs appearing in Billboard charts. Songs are also shown to contain different language biases depending on the gender of the performer, with male solo artist songs containing more and stronger biases. This is the first large scale analysis of this type, giving insights into language usage in such an influential part of popular culture.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

Betti¹,

Abrate²,

Kaltenbrunner³

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In a study limited to the year 2009, the top 10 song charts were shown to be more likely to contain sexual content if compared to songs from the same album by the same artist that did not enter the top 10 [50]. According to previous studies, we also found an higher fraction of songs containing sexist content among Hip hop and R&B and soul songs [33,51], albeit other genres are not exempted from this trend [52]. Hip hop and R&B and soul were also found to display an increasing trend in associating competence more frequently to men than women [35].…”

Section: Sexism (Rq1)supporting

confidence: 60%

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

2023

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We employ Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse 377,808 English song lyrics from the “Two Million Song Database” corpus, focusing on the expression of sexism across five decades (1960–2010) and the measurement of gender biases. Using a sexism classifier, we identify sexist lyrics at a larger scale than previous studies using small samples of manually annotated popular songs. Furthermore, we reveal gender biases by measuring associations in word embeddings learned on song lyrics. We find sexist content to increase across time, especially from male artists and for popular songs appearing in Billboard charts. Songs are also shown to contain different language biases depending on the gender of the performer, with male solo artist songs containing more and stronger biases. This is the first large scale analysis of this type, giving insights into language usage in such an influential part of popular culture.

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“…Lyrical differences manifest themselves in the content of songs as well. In a linguistic analysis of 200 popular contemporary songs sampled from Billboard, Hart and Day (2020) found that rock music contains sexual content moderately correlated with lyrics expressing anxiety, while rap and R&B music have higher frequencies of sexual content, strongly correlated with lyrics expressing anger. Evidently, lyrical features can characterize genres, raising the question of whether lyrical repetition can also do so.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relating Musical Genre and Lyrical Repetition

Lim,

Park

2023

J Stud Res

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In the literature on music and repetition, it has been found that both repetition and genre influence liking for music. Naturally, this leads to the question of whether repetition and genre influence each other. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that there is an association between songs’ musical genre and their amount of lyrical repetition. Using the percent compressibility of lyrics as a measure of repetitiveness, the average repetitiveness of ten songs for each of ten genres was compared across genres. Based on these measures of average repetitiveness, it was possible to separate the genres into categories that were statistically significantly different: R&B, pop, EDM, and hip-hop were most repetitive; Latin and country were moderately repetitive; and metal, rock, folk, and blues were least repetitive. This confirmed the hypothesis that there is an association between musical genre and lyrical repetition and establishes repetitiveness as a new criterion by which musical genres can be classified.

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A Linguistic Analysis of Sexual Content and Emotive Language in Contemporary Music Genres

Cited by 5 publications

References 40 publications

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

Large scale analysis of gender bias and sexism in song lyrics

Relating Musical Genre and Lyrical Repetition

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