What Does Our Music Say About Us? Python Music Experiment Part 2

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Perhaps you tried my class' experiment with their favorite music, finding out the frequency of a word and seeing if there was any significance in the repetition of that word. We did a another experiment where we analyzed the Billboard Top 100 for 2000-2009.

The words that came up most frequently (with a couple of random outliers) were:
Me
My
Got
We
I’m
Love
Your
Mine
With
Baby
I
You
Like
Do you see a connection? They did. Especially as they are reading Romeo and Juliet in their Humanities class. Love and possessions is what the students felt was being repeated over and over. While the profitability in increasing desire and hype over possessions is obvious, I posed to them, "Why might a lyricist or company hype up songs about love?" One student's response, "Because when you are in love you will do anything for them or buy them anything."

I then posed to them the challenge of writing a song (a good song!) that does not use any of these words. It was like lyrical Taboo. It would be interesting to see what our culture would be like if we didn't use these songs in all of our most played songs.

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