As a way to ring in the new year, and as a follow up to a previous post on variation in names for moonshine, I take a look here at how the topic of drinking is represented in lyrics from songs in Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2014). In particular, I look at how often alcoholic beverages are mentioned in these songs and how they are represented linguistically, that is, whether they are referred to by generic names, brand names, or nicknames.*

Figure 1 shows how often variants for alcoholic beverages appear in the collection by decade. It should be noted that each unique variant was counted only once for each song that it appeared in, e.g. the variant tequila was recorded once for The Champs' "Tequila" (1958), despite its appearing in the song three times; if the brand name Patron had also occurred in the song three times, then two variants -- tequila and Patron -- would have been recorded for the song.

As illustrated, references to alcohol in popular music have increased during recent decades. But, as shown, this increase has not been linear, as reference to drinking in the collection dropped to nearly zero in the songs of the 1960s and dropped again in the 1980s. Nevertheless, the chart shows that the lion's share of references to alcohol in the collection of lyrics has been in more recent songs.

For me, however, what is more interesting about this expanding usage are the accompanying changes in the kinds of words that appear in the collection. For instance, in the 1950s only the variants liquor, tequila, and wine are mentioned in this regard, with liquor and tequila appearing only once apiece and wine in songs from five different years. In the 1960s, only drink and gin appear (in one song apiece). In the 1970s, there is greater variety, with drink(s), moonshine, rye, whiskey, and wine appearing (wine again being the most common variant, as it was in the 1950s, with three uses). And in the 1980s, beer, champagne, drink(s), and wine each appear one time apiece in the collection. The lexical stew thickens, however, in the 1990s with the appearance not only of previously used variants champagne, gin, liquor, and wine, but also of brand names, such as Cristal, slang, such as bub, bubbly and forty, and a combination of the two, as in Crooked Ides. In the 2000s, we see even greater use of brand names, as well as informal takes on these names, in Bacardi, Hennessey (or Henny), Louis "one-three," Patron, and X and O, while also seeing a return to the ultra-generic drink(s) (n=6). In short, the topic of drinking was a popular one in the 2000s, as evidenced not only by the number of times that it surfaced, but also in the myriad ways that it did so.

So what about the 2010s? So far, there seems to be a general trend away from the use of brand names that marked the 2000s and, to a lesser extent the 1990s, as the most frequent term in the collection is drink(s) (n=4), and other terms include the generic liquor, as well as gin and whiskey. However, the brand name Jack shows up in Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" (2010) and Southern (for Southern Comfort) in Florida Georgia Line's "Cruise" (2013) and the line "cup of Ace, cup of Goose, cup of Cris" in Iggy Azalea's "Fancy" (2014), which shows that the practice of calling out brands of liquor by name hasn't totally been lost. How the rest of the decade will play out in this respect remains to be seen; however, it seems fairly certain that there will not be a lack of drinking terms in American pop music anytime soon.

*This post would not have been possible without the assistance of Clayton Darwin and BRDi tools.