How Sexy Cigarettes After Sex Really Is

Published in

The Startup

4 min readSep 24, 2020

Cigarettes After Sex Live at AB — Ancienne Belgique

I was reading an article from Pudding.cool talking about which singer has the most EMO song lyrics, rapper or band? The Pudding.cool defines EMO as sadness and fear emotion in song lyrics and rank 100 tracks from rapper and band based on EMO words that appear in the song lyrics.

Then i started to wondering if you can tell that a song is EMO, so how can you tell that a song is “sexy”?

One of many artist with sexy type of music that crossed my mind is Cigarettes After Sex. An American dream pop band who constantly (i think) singing about romance and love song. For me, their song is all about laying in bed looking to those ceiling and slowly closing your eyes down.

“If you’re intimate with someone, you wouldn’t be speaking in the voice I am now. It would be quiet and gentle and mellow. That’s the voice of Cigarettes.”

So my question is how sexy Cigarettes After Sex really is if we only focused on the lyrics?

Data Preparation

I used lyricsgenius to get all tracks from the band and saved it to a json file and parse it into a table (dataframe).

There are 42 tracks in English and 1 track in German

Cigarettes After Sex Song Lyrics

To visuals words in lyrics i used word cloud. Word cloud is a collection of words in different size depends on the word frequency. Also i remove common words that generally don’t evoke meaning, such as “the” and “a,” pronouns, prepositions, basic verbs such as “is” and some lyric like “ooh” and “yeah”.

As we can see the band quite often use the word “love”, “baby”, “dreaming”, “want”, and “heart”.

Sexy Score

I tried to find what phrase or word can possibly describe “sexy” and i found a research that analyzed the 100 most popular songs (1958–1998) for artist characteristics and expression of love. The research result shows that:

Men used an average of .08 sex words per line of lyrics, and women used twice as many, .19 sex words per line.
Men used an average of .16 love words per line of lyrics, and women used .26 love words per line.

But unfortunately the research doesn’t contain all the phrase or word they use to define sex and love expressions. I also tried this website to find words that are related to a specific word or phrase. But it only show some dirty and sexual activity related words (which is kinda make sense).

Since none of them work for me, i finally used word similarity to calculate the sexy score for each track . Word similarity is a number between 0 to 1 which tells us how close two words are, semantically. This is done by finding similarity between word vectors in the vector space.

For example, the word “king” is more similar with the word “queen” than the word “sleep”.

Therefore i come up with this formula:

word in formula refers to every unique word in each song lyric.

and to help me with similarly, i use Spacy library in Python.

and….

the sexiest Cigarettes After Sex track goes to….

..

…

🎉🎉🎉

Is the winner your favorite one? :)

Mine is in 4th place. Lol

Let’s Compare CAS Songs with Top 5 Billboard Sexiest Songs

I saw a Billboard article while trying to define what sexy sounds like in a song. The article contains 50 sexiest songs including the sexiest lyric part. The top 5 tracks are:

“Physical” — Olivia Newton-John
“Tonight’s The Night” — Rod Stewart
“I’ll Make Love To You” — Boyz II Men
“Too Close” — Next
“Let’s Get It On” — Marvin Gaye

Then i decided to compare the top 5 Billboard tracks with Cigarettes After Sex tracks and the result is quite surprising :)

The word “sexy” itself can be defined as wild as we want it to be and even non-romantic songs can also sound sexy if you like it that way. Young & Dumb maybe win this game because the song has so many noun-word that close to word “sexy” but it doesn’t change the fact about how sexy ‘our own song’.

Wearing black lipstick, bleaching your hair blonde
Put on your socks
Cut-offs or jean shorts, vampire fangs
And your “I Love New York” shirt
Well, I know full well that you are
The patron saint of sucking cock
Señorita, you’re a cheater
Well, so am I
You wanna go where the girls are young and dumb
And hot as fuck
Where they’re dancing in the streets
With nothing on
We’ll drive your car to the beach with this song on repeat
You showed me
We’ll drive your car to the beach with this song on repeat
Oh, baby
— young & dumb