Adam Gruber's Adventure in Data Science

What is in a title? Titles can evoke many meanings and give a sense of anticipation. The island of Greenland was further north than Iceland but was named to encourage migration there. Music often has its own tropes. Certain words are used by a genre or artist. They can be tropes that let the audience know it’s definitely a country, rap, or rock song.  Titles can be used to evoke feelings that are new, hot, and fresh or harken back to other eras in music. Some songs are remixes of older songs by different artists or even the same artist. After all, some bands have been making music for decades, like Madonna or the Beatles.  

I used text mining to analyze 7000 songs. These songs came from country music and pop music genres. The artists ranged from the 1960s to the present day. The goal was to see what words are common to pop, country, and both. There are clearly many common tropes and words to evoke certain emotions.  Artists were selected because their music fell primarily in one genre or the other. Artists like Taylor Swift were avoided for that reason. 

The data was taken from Genuis.com. Text mining requires cleaning the data and eliminating any unneeded or duplicate instances. The goal was to find the most common words in titles of Pop Songs and Country songs. This meant eliminating any re-releases without major changes to the song. If Beyonce re-released a live version of her own song, “Single Ladies”, that was removed. Eric Church redid the song, “What Made Milwaukee Famous”, which was kept since it was a complete remake. I chose to keep remixed songs since they are original songs.  That term was heavily used in the pop music genre and indicative of what listeners to that genre enjoyed.  

The word love was the most common word in the title in both genres. Certain words are much more common or completely nonexistent. An example would be the word ain’t. Ain’t is heavily used in country music and not at all in pop music.  This would be an example of a genre trope that was also analyzed. 

Some words were frequent in the data set and common to both genres, like Love, don’t, and baby.  Moving away from the line, we see the divide as many words become genre tropes. Words that are heavily related to tropes like cowboy and Texas in the country music genre. Pop music has words like Hollywood, club, and radio. These words evoke certain feelings about the genres and bring a certain mindset. An example of an outlier to these genre-confirming terms would be  Kid Rock’s song “Cowboy”.

Country music has an often used trope of focusing on sadder songs, to the point that people will joke that a person has so much bad luck their life could be a country song. Sentiment analysis allows us to see how many positive words were used vs negative words. Love is the most common positive word in both genres, but country music does not have as many negative words as the stereotype would suggest. Both genres of music have positive and negative words. Songs express the full breadth of human emotion. There are songs about every human emotion out there, but the popular words to use are positive.  If you are trying to write the perfect sad country song title, words about emotions are not genre-specific. The perfect sad country song title must include genre-specific words such as locations.  An example would be “Lonesome in Texas”.

Certain genres of music have words that are more strongly correlated than others. Word pairings can help identify which combinations are more common to a genre.  If writing a country song title, some words are much more likely to be associated, such as honky and tonk or tonking. Certain artists are considered staples of the genre and are often referenced by other artists in titles and lyrics. Examples include songs titled “If you don’t like Hank Williams” or “I’m gonna get drunk and play Hank Williams”.   

Pop music has its own genre staples similar to country music. The word love has many word pairings and is connected to many others.  This is clearly evident since love was the most used word in both genres. Examples are love paired with; song, crazy, summer, sweet, I’m.  The word “I’m” also has many connections, including; bitch, loser, pied piper, love, and ready. Both genres have “I’m” as one of the top words. Country music has the words “I’m” connected to lonesome, cry, love, and alright. Both genres have the word “I’m” connected to many positive and negative emotions. 

Many pop artists will also make the occasional country music song or album, such as Beyonce’s new country music album, Cowboy Carter. Many of the song titles on there follow the lessons of our text mining analysis. A pop music artist trying to break into the country music genre must convince country music fans they are producing true country music. Beyonce’s number one country single is “Texas Hold’em.” This follows with Texas being strongly correlated with the country music genre. Another song on her albums is “Dolly P.” This is a song about country music singer Dolly Parton, which is another common trope from country music. Several of the other songs include words in their title that are neutral and common to both country and pop music. These include American, amen, and Heaven. 

The title of something gives a sense of what it is. It gives the general public an idea of what to expect. When creating a title for a country song or pop song, there are certain words that are common to both. Both genres use words to evoke certain emotions and feelings, both positive and negative.  Both genres have words that are tropes and very common to that genre specifically. It announces to the listener what to expect. If a singer wishes to change genres, they will need to consider and follow keywords of that genre, as seen with Beyonce.