So, I finally got around to an analysis of the lyrics of the top ten songs of 2018, according to Billboard’s year-end Hot 100. Compared to the lyrics of the 2017 year-end Top Ten, 2018 is, in general, characterized by less. As in less dropping of trade names overall; fewer uses of variants of the n-word (3, compared to 25 in 2017), fewer uses of variants of bitch (9, compared to 62 uses in 2017, making it my candidate for word of the year in music for that year); and less Spanish, by virtue of the 2017 collection having a song sung almost entirely in Spanish (“Despacito Remix”), and the 2018 collection having less concentrated uses of the language (most notably in “I Like It”).

There are two ways in which the lyrics of the 2018 collection stand out, and these are somewhat intertwined. One is in the use of name-dropping overall, particularly in the kinds of names that are dropped, and the other is in the use of what has to be the word of the year in pop music for 2018, at least when measured by its use in songs from Billboard’s year-end Top Ten songs. And that word is “LIKE”, because it is, like, everywhere in the collection.

On the first issue, name-dropping is of course nothing new to 2018, but rather, has probably been seeing an increase in use since the 1990s, with the greater presence of hip-hop in the top ten and the effect of hip-hop and hip-hop culture on other genres of popular music (an issue that should and will be taken up in a future blog). However, name-dropping in this respect has typically been self-referential (a use that is not lost in 2018, for example, in several uses of Cardi B in “I Like It”; in introductions of artists by emcees or other singers/rappers; and as a shout-out to other hip-hop artists who are not a part of the recording. In the 2018 collection, however, we find mentions of rock artists from earlier eras, namely Bon Scott and (Jim) Morrison in the song “Rockstar.” This is, again, not unique to the 2018 collection but does distinguish the general use of name-dropping in other years.

The use of the word like to mean ‘similar to’ is just one of the uses of like in the collection, and in this function it appears before names like Morrison, Jenny (Jennifer Lopez), Lady Gaga, Uncle Sam, and Mario, but it also appears before more generic labels such as rock star, pop star, Rasta, me, and you. The word used in this way naturally occurs prominently in the song “Girls Like You” in the collection. It also appears as a verb, particularly in the song “I Like It”, before nouns such as diamonds, dollars, and million dollar deals. Altogether the word like occurs 117 times in the collection, and it ranks fourth on the list of all words in the corpus (after I, you, me), whereas it is ranked 28th on the list of words in all Billboard year-end Top Ten songs, from 1951-2018, making like the clear-cut forerunner for word of the year for 2018.

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