In our project, we explore the “hottest names in music.” That is, not the artists with the largest number of hits, but the names most frequently referenced in song lyrics. We examine both general and specific names, starting with gendered pronouns and concluding with proper names. Our dataset consists of the “Year-End Hot 100” lists that Billboard published each December from 1965 to 2015. For this data, we used a Python library called pandas to count and chart the unique occurrences of terms surrounding gender and sexuality. Then, we created a modified version of the dataset using spaCy Named Entity Recognition (NER), tagging all entities in the lyrics. We parsed this new dataset for entities tagged as “Persons,” and calculated the number of unique occurrences of names across songs. Our main findings: Terms relating to sexual orientation, including slurs, are uncommon in pop music, but seemed to be increasing through 2015; the use of “bitch” increased dramatically over the years; and the word “girl” has almost always outnumbered the word “boy.” However, male names were much more common than female names. “Sally,” “Kim,” and “Taylor,” appear in the bottom half of the top 10 lists. “Jesus” was the top name identified correctly (occurring in 28 songs), and the only name that appeared consistently across the six decades. Overall, spaCy NER correctly classified 33-66% of the top 10 “Persons” per decade. In the future, we hope to close-read these terms to gain a better understanding of their use in popular music.
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