Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Which Body Part Gets Sung About the Most?


"Across all of the categories, the eyes are most frequently mentioned body part (Hall & Oates, "Private Eyes"), with the exceptions of hip hop, which places a firm emphasis on the posterior (Sir Mix a Lot, "Baby Got Back") and blues (Louisiana Red, "Keep Your Hands Off My Woman") and gospel music (The Gospel, "Put Your Hands Together"), which are respectively focused on the keeping off of one's hands and the clapping or raising of one's hands.

As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least. There are plenty of other data points to peruse. It's nice to know that 23.64 percent of hip hop songs refer to the behind, while 11.83 percent of rock songs talk about eyes."

I guessed similarly.

Read it here.
Hat tip to the MR
graph per wired

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hip-hop. Wow. Quite a %!
Not surprised, however.

Anonymous said...

Not surprised by hip-hop.
Ye gads!

Sra said...

That's great! I've never thought about it before, but I concur with the results.

Anonymous said...

Amazing how the eye gets so much attention. In literature, I bet it would score the highest too.....

Anonymous said...

I had a similar thought the other night: 'I wonder what rappers/hip-hop artists would do if they were not allowed to use the posterior-oriented words anymore. Like if Jesse or Al said that they weren't kosher words to use any more.
Then we'd have a bunch of performers writing title-less songs and albums. Whatever would they do, I ask!

Anonymous said...

And here I was all this time brooding over Snoop's literary magnificence and the Stones' Dante-esque lyrics :)

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