Music is a powerful tool of nostalgia, and songs from certain moments in your life can take you back to that time or place. As music styles and genres change over time – from power ballads to R&B and rap – just how do the lyrics change too?
Interested in finding out, Lottie.org analysed over 35,000 songs from the 1950s to the 2010s in order to determine the shift in what artists have been singing about over the past 70 years.
How lyrics have changed through the decades
| Decade | Love words | Swear words | Money words | Sex words |
| 1950s | 88% | 12% | 7% | 2% |
| 1960s | 85% | 9% | 15% | 2% |
| 1970s | 76% | 19% | 18% | 3% |
| 1980s | 72% | 14% | 15% | 3% |
| 1990s | 73% | 21% | 21% | 6% |
| 2000s | 73% | 24% | 18% | 7% |
| 2010s | 74% | 26% | 20% | 9% |
| Change from 1950s to 2010s | -14% | +14% | +13% | +7% |
Lottie.org found that the category increasing the most is swear words, which are more than twice as common now as they were in the 1950s.
Songs containing words relating to money peaked in the 1990s, and words relating to sex have been on a gradual incline over the past seven decades.
The only category that has decreased are love words. A staggering 88% of songs contained words of love in the 1950s, and although still remaining the most popular topic, this has dropped to 74% in 2010s songs. Popular artists singing about love include Joe Jonas, Meat Loaf and Electric Light Orchestra.
Most popular swears of each decade
| Decade | Most popular swear | Second-most popular swear | Third-most popular swear |
| 1950s | H*ll | Sh*t | B*tch |
| 1960s | H*ll | D*mn | Sh*t |
| 1970s | H*ll | B*tch | Sh*t |
| 1980s | H*ll | D*mn | B*tch |
| 1990s | Sh*t | H*ll | B*tch |
| 2000s | Sh*t | H*ll | B*tch |
| 2010s | Sh*t | B*tch | H*ll |
Lottie.org also discovered the artists who swear the most in their songs:
| Rank | Artist(s) |
| #1 | Lil Wayne |
| #2 | Jeezy/Young Jeezy |
| #3 |
Johnny Cash |
| #4 | Young Thug |
| #5 | Fabolous |
| #6 | Three 6 Mafia |
| #7 | Boosie Badazz |
| #8 | Ja Rule |
| #9 | Juvenile |
| #10 | Master P |
Other notable names include Missy Elliott (#13), Slipknot (#33), Machine Gun Kelly (#41) and Bob Dylan (#43).
Find the full blog post here: https://lottie.org/data-insight/song-analysis-reveals-how-the-lyrics-of-music-have-changed-throughout-the-decades/.