On this day in history in 1945, U.S. Marines raised the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi at Iwo Jima. Captured on film by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, the event would become one of the most popular icons of the 20th century. To commemorate this moment in time, this post takes a look at songs from the Billboard year-end Top Thirty charts (1951-2015) that mention the word flag in them.

In all, there are nine songs in the corpus that include the words flag or flags. Eight of these songs use the word as a noun, as we might expect, generally adhering to the definition of the word as given by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: "n. a usually rectangular piece of fabric of distinctive design that is used as a symbol (as of a nation), as a signaling device, or as a decoration." However, unlike at Iwo Jima, the flags that are mentioned in pop lyrics do not explicitly represent countries, and the only possible reference to the American flag in the collection is in Elton John's "Philadelphia Freedom" (1975):

In Peter, Paul and Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon" (1963), the flags that are referred to are those of the pirate ships that "would lower their flags when Puff roared out his name":

In Gym Class Heroes' "Cupid Chokehold" (2005), reference is made to a white flag, which is typically used to signal surrender:

In two songs, Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot" (2004; NSFW!) and Chris Brown's "Look at Me Now" (2011), flag is used to represent gang colors:

In two songs, The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" (1988) and Imagine Dragons' "Radioactive" (2013), the word has no clear reference:

And, finally, in Vicki Lawrence's "The Night the Lights Went out in Georgia" (1973), flag is used a verb because, of course, English loves to verb its nouns.*

*A process variously referred to as "functional shift", "zero-derivation", and "conversion" in linguistics literature.

Donate