I first narrowed the words down by topics. According to the data that returned, artists love to sing about love. "Love" is mentioned over 4000 times in the Billboard Hot 100 lists since 2000. This came as an unsurprising result due to a study that looked at songs from the even years between 1960-2008 and "documented the presence or absence of a dating relationship, the word ‘love’ (and its uses), sexual activity, and sexual objectification of females and males (separately). Analyses revealed that the vast majority of songs addressed at least one of these themes" (Smiler, Shewmaker, & Hearon, 2017). I was surprised that after love, night was the next topic sung about most often followed by heart.
When conducting my analysis, I decided to leave stop words like "she", "he", "her", "him", "hers", "his", "girl", and "boy". When reading academic articles, many of them stated that women were sung about more often than men. My data shows that this is true. Artists seem to use "she", "girl", and "her" much more often than terms used to describe men. This coincides with the findings from the academic article, "Objectification in popular music lyrics: An examination of gender and genre differences. Sex Roles".
I looked at the vulgar words that appeared in music in the Billboard Hot 100 most often. According to the data, these words were "shit","fuck", "ass", and "bitch". I find these results surprising because I would expect that "ass" and "bitch" would be sung more frequently to correlate with the objectification of genders in songs. While "shit" appears more frequently, vulgar terms are sung about equally. There is not a dramatic usage of one word over the other.
When going through the most popular words, I noticed that there were a lot of references to the senses. This is understandable because lyrics are used to describe experiences and feelings. Using the senses allows listeners to understand experiences and imagine them as well. The most popular senses were sight and touch. Artists most often use "see" and "feel" when describing sensory experiences. I was surprised to see that "look" was not more prominent in the results because "see" was used so often. I thought that similar senses would have been used about equally.
These are the most common 100 words found within the Billboard Hot 100 song lyrics.