Nickelback Has 'Most Sophisticated' Lyrics in Rock, Analyst Says
Marketing expert Andrew Powell-Morse assigned reading scores to popular songs.
— -- A marketing expert who plugged 225 hit songs from the past decade into a database and assigned them grade-level reading scores found that some of the most popular songs are below a third-grade reading level.
Andrew Powell-Morse says he plugged No. 1 songs across different genres on the Billboard chart into the Readability Score -- a tool that creates “an average of the U.S. reading level of a piece of text.”
“Sure, we know hit music lyrics aren’t the peak of sophistication, but who knew the bar was this low,” Powell-Morse wrote on SeatSmart.com of the results. “Well, the bar is actually getting lower. These averages have really been on the decline over the last 10 years.”
Powell-Morse found that of all the genres he analyzed -- Pop, Rock, R&B/Hip Hop and Country -- it was country music that had the “smartest lyrics."
“Country music is full of words like Hallelujah, cigarettes, hillbilly, and tacklebox. Add to that long place names like Cincinnati, Louisville, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and Country has a serious advantage over the competition,” he wrote. “Unfortunately for Pop and R&B/Hip-Hop, places like L.A. and New York just don’t score that many points.”
When it came to analyzing individual singers, Powell-Morse found that rapper Eminem was the “smartest” in the hip-hop category.
The band Nickelback -- with lyrics like, “Look at this photograph…Every time I do it makes me laugh” -- ranked as having the “most sophisticated” lyrics in rock music.
When it comes to having the “smartest” lyrics of all number one songs across all genres, Powell-Morse says the highest average score belongs to Mariah Carey, who is currently doing a residency in Las Vegas.
On the flip side, Carey’s fellow pop music star, singer Kesha, scored the worst.
“As promised, Kesha does manage to score the worst of any major artist I looked more closely at,” Powell-Morse wrote. "Not just a little worse either, although Lady Gaga makes a valiant effort to keep up (keep down?)."