On this day in 1918, General Motors bought Chevrolet, a historical fact brought to my attention by my newsfeed this morning that prompted me to investigate a research question I've been mulling over for awhile: What kinds of vehicles make appearances in pop music and how often? To answer this question, I turned to my collection of lyrics from songs populating Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015).

First, in terms of more-or-less generic types of four-wheeled vehicles, I found the following distribution:

Fig. 1: Distribution of generic names of four-wheeled vehicles in the lyrics of songs from the Billboard year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, references to generic car(s) outperform other such terms by a large margin, both in terms of number of instances and numbers of songs. (Pickup) trucks appears next, followed by the low-level variants limo(usine/s), jeep, four-wheel drive, and S.U.V.

In terms of make and model names that appear in the collection, rather than generic names for vehicle types, the following variants and their distributions were found:

Fig. 2: Names of makes and models of vehicle types in songs from Billboard's year-end Top 10 charts (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As illustrated, Benz is the highest-ranking variant in terms of songs that it appears in, while Chevy is the most frequent variant by total number of instances. Other relatively high-ranking variants are Cadillac(s)/caddy/'lac and Ferrari. The hapax legomena, appearing only once in the collection, are Datsun, Eldorado, Lambo, Lexus, Mercedes, Mustang, and Vette.

This analysis lays down the foundation for the study of words that are used in pop music for describing vehicles. In the future, we will take a look at how the uses and distributions of these words are different compared to others, in an effort to chart language change.

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