Have you ever thought about what makes or breaks a song, perhaps it’s the beat, the rhythm, or is it the lyrics. This paper will discuss the importance of language in song writing and impact it has on the popularity of the song. Samples will be taken from billboard chart top 100 hits of 2000-2020. We will discover the particular words that are most commonly used and perhaps find correlation upon why was it chosen.
To begin with music has been a part of our daily lives for as long as we can remember, It is a form of communication how the artists can express themselves in a way that relay their thoughts through music, it is also an example of how we use language to convey information. When uprising artists were asked what makes the lyrics good, most will answer with ‘Its like telling a story’ , ‘Make it feel casual’ , ‘avoid using complicated metaphors’. This proves that lexis is a moving factor in the music industry, specifically songwriting.
Furthermore, an example of another clear understanding of language can be seen in Ed Sheeran’s song called ‘Shape of You’, within the entirety of the song, the words ‘come on’ was used 34 times, research specializing in memory dates back to as early as 1880s, to a psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus, he was the first man to systematically analyze data regarding memory. In the end thanks to his research, he was able to invent the ‘forgetting curve’, it demonstrates how long it takes for a memory to decay, by combining this information, another important technique is called spaced repetition in which the brain is most effective, this is where advertisement comes in, we hear a certain words, multiple times during the day that causes us to have a strong imprint on our brain that sticks with us, making us remember this songs unconsciously, another similar experiment is when Pavlov’s dog was conditioned to salivate when it hears the bell, we are subconsciously pushed to feel a certain mood or as millennials call it ‘vibing’. We can conclude that including catchy and repetitive words/phrases in songs is indeed incredibly effective. This conclusion further proves involvement of lexis in songwriting.
Moreover, during a research conducted in 2017, words that were using most are the following ; (2000s) ‘You/U’ , ‘Like’ , ‘Breathe’, ‘It’ , ‘Ya’ (2010) ‘We’, ‘Yeah’, ‘Hell’ , ‘Die’. During the 2000s most popular radio songs were mostly romantic songs, hence the words like, you, love ,etc were chosen for songs. During the 2010s the most popular songs were about partying, you only live once, friendship, etc. The trend around this year was centered around being with your gang/team, this was the beginning of the internet were edgy and borderline offensive was regarded as normal, in which a lot of people were to do stupid things to impress their friends, which resulted in a trend.
To further explore this topic, it is not that romance was the trend in the 2000s, its that the top 10 songs were about romance, everyone wanted to jump in on the hype, so they started to copy the top songs and wrote about romance, to summarize its not the songs follow any trend in particular, on the contrary newly written songs would copy themes from hits and most popular songs. Lexis plays a part in which it would emphasize the chosen theme of the song, whether it would be romance with the words (you, love, forever, never, etc ) or solitude (alone, relate ,miss ,need ,etc). The chosen words strengthens the song in a way that compels the listeners to feel a connection to the song.