It’s been quite some time since I wrote my last year-end review of lyrics (2016), or any other post for that matter, but I’ve finally gotten around to an analysis of the lyrics from the songs making up the Billboard Top Ten list for the year 2017. Here, I’d like to discuss two facets of the lyrics that I found interesting.

The first observation is one that quickly became obvious as I read through all the lyrics during the editing process: the use of brand names in music was definitely a thing in 2017. In an earlier post, I discussed how the use of brand names of alcoholic beverages in pop lyrics began increasing in the 1990s, but, by the 2010s their use seemed to be waning. I’ve yet to take a more general look at brand name use in pop lyrics, but a look at 2017 suggests I should, as brand names proliferate in the collection. Altogether six of the Top Ten songs use at least one brand name, and the most common category that these brands belong to is luxury automobiles, the names of which occur in all six songs that have brand names in them. The names are Cadillac (which appears in two songs), Rover, Bentley, Rolls, Mercedes, Ghosts (a type of Rolls Royce), Rari (short for Ferrari) and Lam (short for Lamborghini). Other brand names include Gucci, Polo, Kool-Aid, Rollie (short for Rolex), Mueller, Uzi, Segway, Grey Poupon, D’Usse, Jacuzzi, Photoshop, Uber, Instagram, and Evian. There are also some names of events that can also be considered brand names: Super Bowl and Ted Talks.

The second observation comes from the list of most frequent words in the collection, in search of a “word of the year” in pop music, as I have done in past year-end reviews. Once past the inevitable grammatical, or “stop”, words that populate the highest ranks of such lists (e.g. the, of, to), two content words just barely crack the top twenty wordlist in 2017: hold and bitch. Hold appears at #16 on the list, occurring 62 times in one song (“Humble”), invariantly as part of the phrasal verb hold up (the variant holding appears once in “Bad and Boujee”). Bitch appears at #18 on the list, occurring 60 times in three songs (in decreasing order of use): “Humble”, “Bad and Boujee”, and “Congratulations” (the variant bitches also occurs twice in “Bad and Boujee”). Because its overall frequency is comparable to that of hold, but its use has a somewhat greater spread over the collection, bitch would appear to be the better candidate for word of the year with respect to a quantitative analysis of 2017 year-end Top Ten songs.