THE MILLENNIAL WHOOP
I am what you would call a pop culture expert, and by expert I mean someone who is completely oblivious to pop culture. I don’t follow the latest cultural trends, I rarely use Facebook, and what little news I do get I skim from Reddit. One thing I do like, however, is popular music. I admit I enjoy listening to the latest Tay Tay Swift when I exercise/read/contemplate the infinitesimally small impact of my life compared to the whole of the universe.
So when I stumbled across a video about the Millennial Whoop, a trending pattern in pop songs, I was intrigued because it was a culturally relevant topic I could actually relate to. In a nutshell, the Millennial Whoop shows that an emerging aspect of popular music these days is a “whoop” sound (watch the video).
In an effort to meet girls, the same time I saw the Millennial Whoop video, I was also learning about data science as it relates to text mining and text analysis. I wondered if I could apply some data science techniques to the lyrics of pop songs to see if there were any other trends common across popular music.
BACKGROUND RESEARCH
As I started thinking about how I would tease out trends and insights from popular song lyrics, I was inspired by a tutorial on clustering movies based off their synopses. My plan was to apply the same idea to song lyrics.
I found that someone had already created a pop song dataset. In fact, Kaylin essentially did all the preliminary analysis I was planning on doing and seems way better at data analysis than I am. That’s cool too I guess.
METHODOLOGY
With a database of song lyrics in one hand and an insatiable hunger to mine the depths of Billboard hits in the other, I began preparing the lyrics for analysis.
- I removed “stopwords”.
Words like “the”, “a”, “if”, etc. - I stemmed the lyrics
Words like “loves” and “loved” were reduced to “love” - I removed words with less than 5 letters
While not perfect, this was a quick way to filter out any remaining words that don’t really have any meaning (“don’t”, “want”, etc). - Created a tf-idf matrix for the “corpus” of lyrics.
This is a fancy way of saying I determined the similarity of two songs by looking at words that were common between the lyrics of the two songs but not common across every song. - I clustered the songs
I grouped similar songs together and found the words that the groupings were based on.
After testing different numbers of clusters, I found that 7 clusters worked reasonably well in providing meaningful clusters.
Because clusters aren’t completely stable, I ran the clustering program 5 times and compared the outputted clusters from each trial against each other.
RESULTS
Looking at the different clusters across the five trials, a few common clusters jumped out:
X-RATED SONGS (AKA BANNED MIDDLE SCHOOL SONGS)
Words clustered on: nigga, bitch, money, cause, right, started
Example Songs: Thong Song, Big Pimpin, In Da Club, Get Low, Moment 4 Life, No Mediocre, Believe Me, Rack City, Truffle Butter, Coco, Back to Back
The cluster with the dirtiest lyrics also happened to be the most consistent. The X-Rated Songs cluster (aka Banned Middle School Songs) showed up in all five trials with almost exactly the same words.
From “Thong Song” to “Rack City” to “Truffle Butter”, these songs ensured that you were constantly expanding your Urban Dicationary vocabulary.
DANCE ANTHEMS (AKA SONGS THAT GET YOU TO DANCE BY TELLING YOU TO DANCE)
Words clustered on: dance, shake, floor, cause, girls, thing,
Example Songs: Shake Ya Ass, I Hope you Dance, I Hope You Dance, Rock Your Body, Lose Control, Lean Wit It Rock Wit It, Pop Champagne, In The Dark, Shower, Shut Up and Dance, Uma Thurman
It seems like the only thing people like more than dancing to music is dancing to music explicitly telling them to dance. There was an entire cluster of songs whose only purpose was to get people to shake their body parts and showcase their genetic fitness.
Songs ranged from the encouraging (“I Hope You Dance”) to the demanding (“Shut Up and Dance”) to the downright instructional (“Lean Wit it Rock Wit it”).
SONGS ABOUT TONIGHT/THE NIGHT (AKA SONGS THAT ENCOURAGE SMART DECISION MAKING)
Words clustered on: night, tonight, right, little, cause, alright
Example Songs: Waiting for Tonight, Its Five O’Clock Somewhere, Overnight Celebrity, Day N Nite, Last Friday Night, Die Young, Tonight Tonight, I Gotta Feeling, I Love College, Hotling Bling, Time of Our Lives, Heartbeat Song
Tonight is an important night and these songs won’t let you forget it. While some songs simply celebrated the night for its possibilities (“Die Young”, “I Gotta Feeling”, “I Love College”), the majority of songs asked you to celebrate the night in a specific way (“Give Me Just One Night”, “Tonight I’m Lovin You”)…with someone else…if you get my drift… .
I’m talking about sex.
BREAKUP SONGS (AKA “WE NO LONGER HAVE A RELATIONSHIP BUT I STILL HAVE FEELINGS FOR YOU” SONGS)
Words clustered on: heart, cause, breaking, every, leave, believe
Example songs: Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely, Gotta Get Thru This, Miss You, Everytime We Touch, Angel, Teenage Dream, Boulevard of Broken Dreams, From the Bottom of My Broken Hearts, Bleeding Love, Brokenhearted, Elastic Heart
These are the songs that talk about offering your heart to someone (“Angel”, “Everytime We Touch”, “Teenage Dream”) and watching it be shattered into a million little pieces, ground into fine dust, and scattered across the Eastern Seaboard. (“From the Bottom of My Broken heart”, “Bleeding Love”, “Brokenhearted”)
Hopefully the stacks of money these artists have made from creating these songs can help mend their broken hearts.
LOVE BALLADS (AKA SONGS GUYS PLAY TO APPEAR DEEP)
Words clustered on: thing, everything, world, something, friend, cause
Example Songs: Kryptonite, Chasing Cars, Hey There Delilah, Viva La Vida, Replay, Tattoo, Sweetest Girl, Payphone, Counting Stars, Hey Brothers, Runaway Love, Dear Future Husband
These are the songs you play to reconnect with your sensitive side. There’s a lot of rock/alternative hits every teenage boy knows how to play on guitar such as “Chasing Cars”, “Hey There Delilah”, and “Viva La Vida”.
CRAZY SONGS (AKA “IS THIS PROMOTING A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP” SONGS)
Words clustered on: think, crazy, cause, dreamed, better, maybe
Example Songs: A Thousand Miles, Just Like A Pill, Can’t Get You Out of my Head, Toxic, Lovestoned, Your Love is my Drug, Irreplaceable, Before He Cheats, Womanizer, Cooler Than Me, Bad Blood
There’s a thin, 1 pt, light grey, dotted line between being crazy about someone and just plain crazy. These songs play casual game of hopscotch with that line. Some of these songs use slightly disturbing analogies to describe the artist’s love life (“Toxic”, “Lovestoned”, “Your Love is My Drug”).
Other songs talk about the consequences of ending a relationship — from the relatively tame “Irreplaceable” (“Everything you own in a box to the left”) to the slightly more aggressive “Before He Cheats” (“I dug my key into the side / Of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive”)
BONUS CLUSTER: SONGS ABOUT “LIGHTS” AKA “SERIOUSLY, JUST SONGS ABOUT LIGHTS”
Words clustered on: lights, shine, cause, night, dreamed, inside
Example Songs: Gimme the Light, Green Light, Firework, All of the Lights, Diamonds, Get Your Shine On, Dynamite, Flashing Lights, Shower
This cluster only showed up once in my five trials, but it was such a unique cluster that I thought I would include it.
All the songs that talked about lighting in some way (“Gimme the Light,” “Flashing Lights,” “All of the Lights,” “Diamonds”).
CLOSING THOUGHTS
There’s definitely opportunities to dig deeper into the actual meanings of the lyrics rather than just the words in the lyrics. I also think it would be interesting to see how the lyrics of pop songs have changed over time.
Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised by how well the clusters turned out. Although there were songs that didn’t perfectly fit into any of the clusters, the clusters that did emerge had clear patterns and were fairly distinct.
Other Things
If you enjoyed this article a “Recommend” goes a long way to helping spread this post to other people.
My roommate and I work on a range of projects that mix creativity, analysis, and froyo. Here are some of our other articles that you may enjoy:
How Young is Too Young? How Old is Too Old?
Data Visualizations of The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
You can see all our articles at LateNightFroyo.com, “Like” us on Facebook, and follow us on Twitter.
REFERENCE
[1] Image created using icons designed by freekpik from Flaticon
