Profanity in lyrics: most used swear words and their usage by popular genres
Originally published at lab.musixmatch.com
Previously we looked at the vocabulary sizes of popular genres.
In this article we focus on the usage of profanity in lyrics and in popular genres.
Most used profanities in lyrics
An average of 0.5% to 0.7% (80–90 words) of all words that a person speaks each day are swear words. 80% of the swearing is accounted by 10 words (fuck, shit, hell, damn, goddamn, Jesus Christ, ass, oh my god, bitch and sucks) — wikipedia
To compare usage of profanity in lyrics to the above numbers we analysed the lyrics of the most popular artists on Musixmatch.
The dataset was scanned for the frequency of occurrence of each word from this list of swear words. An average of 0.45% of all words in lyrics are swear words. 1 in every 234 words in lyrics is a swear word. This is slightly less than the frequency of swear words in conversations.
The following 25 swear words account for 91% of swearing in lyrics. More details about the analysis can be found here.
Most profane genre
The previous analysis also revealed that 185 words account for 99% of all profanity in lyrics. The lyrics of 8 popular genres — Hip Hop, Heavy Metal, Pop, Rock, Indie Rock, Country, Electronic and Folk — are analysed for the occurence of these 185 words. These are the results.
Every Hiphop song has 10 profanities on average.The top 3 swear words used are nigga, shit and niggas. But the ‘n word’ is generally not used in an offensive context in Hiphop. On removing it along with its conjugations from the analysis of Hiphop lyrics, 1 in every 74 words is a swear word in Hiphop lyrics. This still means 6 profanities in every song. Even with this reduction hip hop still remains the most profane genre overall.
Heavy metal lyrics are known for their aggressive and violent imagery. So its no surprise it takes second rank here.
Even though Electronic music is mostly instrumental but it still ranks third.
Pop, Indie Rock and Rock have comparable profanity frequencies (1 in every 1000 words). For every 4 songs on average for these genres we would find 1 profanity.
Folk lyrics have 1 swear word for every 2925 words while for Country lyrics this is 1 for every 4438 words. This also means that for every 22 Folk songs and every 20 Country songs we can find 1 profanity. This is very less compared to Hiphop.
Conclusion
The usage of profanity in lyrics is comparable to it’s usage in every day speech. Also, 185 swear words account for 99% of all swearing in lyrics. With respect to these words, we found that Hiphop lyrics are the most profane.
While researching this article, we understood that defining profanity is a problematic (and sometimes funny ) issue and it depends a lot on contextual factors (culture, geography, importance to the narrative, etc). On the flipside, it is also possible to be highly offensive without ever using any profanities. This study is merely a statistical analysis of lyrics and a way to contrast the writing styles of different genres.
Check out more studies from Musixmatch
1. Hip hop has the largest average vocabulary size followed by Heavy Metal
2. Predicting the Grammys with data
