Pop Music Trend Since 2000

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Is it just me or has music gotten more and more vulgar? It seems that older music that hit top ten was not as explicit as it is today. I’m a big fan of Rock from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and early 80’s, from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to Led Zepplin and AC/DC. As much as these artists from the past allude to sexual ideas, they keep the dirty language to a minimum as opposed to today’s chart toping songs, which seem to me to not care much about word choice.

For me and my partner’s final project we decided to see if what we thought we saw in pop music was indeed an actual phenomenon or just our imagination(similar to our parents saying, “Back in my day, we were more discrete…”). At first we were gonna do all the top songs of every year since 1958 to 2015.(-_-). We immediately realized thats like a bujilion songs, and 2 bujilion lines of lyrics to scan. So we capped it from the turn of the century (2000) to 2015. Considering the fact that there is still 100 top sings in every year, we were still gonna have 1500 songs to scan. No, that was still a crap ton so we settled on top 10 songs of each year, to have a total of 150 songs to scan. Since I don’t even know have many songs are in a bujilion, I consider 150 quite doable.

Very similar to how we scanned the novels in class using python scripts, we are gonna scan the lyrics of the songs. Well search each songs for the count of vulgar words that it contains to hopefully see that the top 10 songs in 2000 were using less explicit language than today’s top 10. Hopefully. This doesn’t seem too dificult of a task, but definetly time comsuming since we gotta scan 150 txt documents that contain the lyrics to songs.

Let’s hope everything goes well. And that’s Red’s Final Project.