One of the more controversial shibboleths of English, the word ain't had been, until recently, generally overlooked in linguistic studies focusing on single features. Donaher and Katz (2015), however, aimed to fill this gap by presenting a collection of studies on the use of ain't across a variety of time periods, genres, regions, and social classes of the United States. To add to this work on the word in its various habitats, this post presents evidence of the use of ain't in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015).

An analysis of the collection reveals ain't being used 409 times in 127 of the 650 songs of the collection. Figure 1 shows the distribution of ain't by the number of songs it appears in and its total number of occurrences (or, tokens) in the songs of the collection through the years.

Fig. 1: Timeline of ain't usage in Top Ten (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 1: Timeline of *ain't* usage in Top Ten (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, ain't makes its first appearance in the collection in 1955, appearing in three songs that year, one being a Fats Domino song covered by Pat Boone** (and renamed "Ain't That a Shame"), from “Ain’t IT a Shame”). After an initial surge in the use of ain't in pop music (at least in terms of tokens), with the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s (bolstered by its frequent use in Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" [1956] and in Chubby Checker's "The Twist" [1960]), use of the word by number of songs and tokens in the collection goes into a period of decline until 1970, a year that finds the word being used frequently in two songs released on the Motown label: Diana Ross and The Supremes' "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and Edwin Starr's "War". For the remainder of the 1970s, and during the 1980s and '90s, use of the word decreases in general, with surges in the middle of each decade. Use of the word peaks, however, in the 2000s, in songs like Eve's "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" (2001), 50 Cent's "In Da Club" (2003), Alicia Keys' "If I Ain't Got You" (2004), Kanye West's "Gold Digger" (2005), and Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" (2005), as rap and hip-hop explode in popularity and exert a powerful influence on other forms of popular music. While high in use at the beginning of the decade, there has been a declining use of ain't in the 2010s (by song and token), possibly predicting a drop to pre-aught levels.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of ain't usage in the collection by decade.

Fig. 2: Ain't use by number of songs and tokens across decades in the collection (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 2: *Ain't* use by number of songs and tokens across decades in the collection (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

Figure 2 serves to reiterate the popularity of the word in the aughts and its relative consistency (at least by number of songs) in the 1970s-'90s. While we are only halfway through the 2010s, the number of songs that include ain't thus far shows its use being on pace to reach the level set in the 2000s; however, as depicted in figure 1, performance of ain't has slacked off over the last few years, and it remains to be seen how many songs the word will occur in through the remainder of the decade. Furthermore, the total number of tokens so far this decade is considerably lower than it was midway through the first decade of the new millennium.

In addition to the sheer frequency of ain't in the collection, the linguistic contexts that it occurs in are worth noting. For instance, ain't occurs in double negation constructions, such as "Ain't no mountain high enough", 165 times in the collection, which is roughly 40 percent of its total usage. It also co-occurs with the oft-maligned (in American English, anyway) got in constructions such as "if I ain't got you" a total of 35 times. Such usage suggests that at least part of the motivation for the use of ain't in pop music is its ability to index rebelliousness, non-conformity, and toughness to audiences (often comprising teens and young adults) placing a high value on these qualities. By day, ain't is frowned upon and a cause for censure and rebuke in classrooms and business meetings, but at the end of the day, ain't becomes a sign that the user is not beholden to the authorities.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Donate

*This post would not have been possible without technical assistance from my good friend Dr. Clayton Darwin and the use of BRDi Tools.

**According to a rumor that is highly relevant to the analysis here, the squeaky clean Boone wanted to change the verboten ain't to isn't in this song, but in the end ain't remained the negated copula of choice for the song's chorus.

Reference

Donaher, Patricia, and Seth Katz (eds.). 2015. Ain'thology: The History and Life of a Taboo Word. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.