We've all been pretty well aware that the music widely played on the radio doesn't exactly have the most intelligently-written lyrics we've ever heard. How unintelligent are they? Well, according to one writer at SeatSmart, radio rock particularly doesn't even get up to a fourth grade reading level. We'll get to the chart in a minute, but first off read the methodology.
I turned to the Readability Score. It uses writing analysis tools like the Flesch-Kincaid grade index and many others to create an average of the US reading level of a piece of text. I plugged in song lyrics (punctuation added by me, since most songs lack it altogether) and out of the machine popped out average grade level, word count, and other very interesting metrics.
All told, I analyzed 225 songs in 4 different datasets, resulting in 2,000+ individual data points. How’d I choose them? If they spent at least a few weeks (3+) at #1 on the Billboard charts for Pop, Country, Rock, and R&B/Hip-Hop for any given year, they made the list.
Works for me. Granted this isn't science in the name of science- just something fun that seems like it was logically put together. So here we go!
Well… damn dude, look at that. Really? I guess I've never heard Nickelback's other music that wasn't widely popular or used in some Internet meme, so maybe the band is singing words that actually make a little more sense in some other jams.
Further down the page, they examine more songs and Nickelback ranks higher than Metallica, Ozzy and even Tool. What the hell?!
Did we just defend Nickelback? We definitely didn't shit on 'em… so I guess we did. Dammit.
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