Following up on my most recent obsession with fire, as evidenced by my posts from yesterday and last week, I decided to take a look at how the four elements are represented in pop music. More specifically, I wanted to see how these elements would fare against one another in quantitative terms, by doing a simple search on the terms air, earth, fire(s), and water(s) on lyrics from songs on the Billboard year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015). I hypothesized that fire would take the top spot, due to the association between fire and passion, which is such an important element of so many rock and pop songs, and other ways that fire and heat are used as metaphors for youth, energy, and the like. Even the lists of songs that made these posts possible are referred to as the "Hot 100." Without further, here are the results:

Figure 1: Names of elements in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Fire does, indeed, appear most frequently in the dataset, as in this song, in which it occurs more than a dozen times:

As well as this one:

And this smoking classic:

Nevertheless, fire only barely outdoes air (at least in terms of number of instances), as air appears often when talking about smells (of perfume, flowers, etc.) or about something one throws their hands up into (presumably when dancing), as in this song:

It is also often used to show that the love of a particular person is as important as air, as in the following:

Occurring less frequently is water, but its importance is represented in songs such as this classic:

Finally, earth is the least frequently appearing element in the dataset, and when it does occur it often does so as the name of our planet, as in the following video. At times it also refers ambiguously to our planet or soil.

Although the polysemous nature of earth creates problems for a straightforward analysis, the problem of polysemy, or of figurative use of language, occurs for other element terms as well. For instance, in "The Battle of New Orleans" (1959) the word fire is used as a military command, a distinction that might disqualify the song in a more rigid analysis.

Several songs in the dataset, such as "It Must Have Been Love" (1990) and "American Pie" (1972), mix and match two elements; however, none of the songs in the collection includes terms for all four concepts.

I leave you with a few great tunes that include terms for element but are not part of the Top Ten collection used for this analysis:

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