Variants of "beer" in Top 30 music (1951-2015)
Well, Oktoberfest is well underway and so the thoughts of many have turned to drinking. Unlike an earlier blog I posted on references to drinking in pop music, today's post focuses on songs in the Billboard year-end Top 30 charts, instead of only the Top 10, and, more importantly, it focuses only on variants of "beer" in the collection. Such variants include not only the word beer but references to brands, such as Bud and Crooked Ides, and containers often associated with beer, such as pint and forty. The full set of variants, and the proportion that each was used, is illustrated in the figure below.
Figure 1: "Beer" variants and their relative use compared to each one another in songs from the Billboard year-end Top 30 charts (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
As my earlier post on drinking references in pop music showed, there has been an increase in references to variants of "beer" in pop songs since its first use, especially in the last two decades, although they still appear relatively infrequently, as shown in the figure below:
Figure 2. Number of songs mentioning beer or its variants in the Billboard year-end Top 30 charts (1951-2015) (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)
Videos of "beer" songs uncovered by my analysis are posted below (in chronological order).
And now for a few "beer" songs not appearing in my Top 30 collection: