What can more than 380,000 songs tell us about cars?
So get out of our dreams and into our little red Corvette, because life is a highway and we can’t drive 55.From ’Cars’ to ’Drive My Car’ to ‘Pink Cadillac’, cars and pop music have always felt comfortable sharing the road. And though data analysis isn’t a very rock’n’roll thing to do, we couldn’t help but wonder what we would learn when we analysed a dataset of lyrics to over 380,000 songs.
Crunching the numbers
Recognisable mentions of cars in lyrics are fairly rare – we found a reference in about 1.75% of the songs. For comparison’s sake, the term ‘love’ popped up in about 20%. Some of our data is tweaked slightly by a few car names being homonymous with other things. For example, the data would have you believe that metalheads really like driving Lotuses, but they were probably just invoking the symbolic aspects of the lotus flower. There’s a similar thing going on with ‘dodge’, ’jaguar’, ‘Saturn’ and ‘scion’.
Who likes cars the most
It will probably not surprise you that hip-hop artists are rather fond of dropping car names into their songs. Over 50% of car mentions came from the genre. The only other genre to make a dent was rock, with 20% of mentions. Lift your game, jazz musicians. As expected, hip-hop dominates mentions of luxury marques. For example, of the 132 mentions of Maybach, 115 were in hip-hop (87%). Hip-hop was actually dominant across most makes, which is likely a consequence of rap songs simply having more words in general. In fact, Ford was the only manufacturer hip-hop didn’t dominate – rock got the edge there, with 43% of mentions to hip-hop’s 26%.
Which car reigns supreme?
Turns out Cadillac is the Cadillac of cars in songs. Of the 6,375 mentions of car manufacturers we found, 901 were of Cadillac – about 15%. This is consistent across genres: Caddys were number one in rock, pop and hip-hop. Of the genres with statistically significant amounts of data, only country held out against Cadillac’s dominance. Chevrolets got the edge (but not by much) in country music – probably due to love for the humble pick-up truck. Chevy is second overall, followed by Bentley and Mercedes-Benz (Janis Joplin would be proud). The top ten is rounded out by (in order) Ford, Jeep, Lamborghini, Dodge, Porsche and Lexus. If you consider Dodge to be disqualified because it could be confused with the verb, then Ferrari sneaks in under the wire.
What about other modes of transport?
The generic ‘car’ (or ‘cars’) turned up 10,190 times. But what might surprise you is that musicians are far more apt to take a train (4,379 mentions) than a plane (2,035 mentions). In fact, they’re almost as likely to take a bus (1,755 mentions). So much for musicians being fancy jetsetter types. One thing we can say for sure is that they wouldn’t be at home in Melbourne: the humble tram rated only 30 mentions across the whole dataset.
Rarities and B-sides
Renault was mentioned four times; Peugeot and Citroën twice apiece. So if we’ve learnt anything, it’s this: if you want to be a successful musician, don’t drive a French car.
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