Explicit Language in English Song Lyrics: Should We Be Concerned?

A casual music fan who pays attention to song lyrics may notice that explicit lyrics and profanity in music vary across genres, genders and periods. In this sense, the explicit language includes but is not limited to verbal insults (i.e., whore, bitch, faggot, the n-word and other racial slurs), linguistic units that are of sexual nature (i.e., dick, coochie, fuck) and other commonly used profane linguistic units (i.e., shitty, bullshit). To examine this, a linguistic analysis was conducted using the linguistic development environment software and corpus processor NooJ. A corpus of 300 English songs was collected, evenly distributed across six genres (pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, funk and country), with 25 songs by male and 25 by female artists in each. The lyrics were sourced from Spotify’s genre charts for October 2022. A syntactic grammar was employed to identify explicit words and phrases, achieving a precision of 0.95, recall of 0.92, and an F-score of 0.93. Hip-hop exhibited the highest frequency of explicit language, with female hip-hop artists using more profanity than their male counterparts. An upward trend in explicit word usage was noted from the 1950s to the 2020s, indicating a shift towards more explicit content in recent decades. The analysis revealed that hip-hop songs and songs from more recent decades tend to feature a higher frequency of explicit language. The study sheds light on the evolving landscape of explicit content in music and the surprising role of gender and race in its usage.