In this post, I take the first step in investigating how the concept of money is dealt with in pop lyrics, by taking the most obvious course of action: doing a search for the word money in songs appearing in Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015). The figure below shows the number of songs that the word appears in by decade, as well as the number of times it occurs in the songs.

Fig. 1: Frequency of money in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015) by # of songs it appears in and number of occurrences (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org) — Fig. 1: Frequency of *money* in songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015) by # of songs it appears in and number of occurrences (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As the table shows, the word occurs infrequently in the first three decades of the lyric collection we are now working with, then increases significantly in the 1980s. In the 1990s, its use wanes ever so slightly in terms of number of songs but drastically in terms of number of occurrences. However, its usage in terms of both number of songs that it occurs and number of times that it occurs booms in the 2000s. Halfway through the 2010s, use of this word shows no sign of slowing down, as the number of songs has already matched that of the entire 2000s and number of total occurrences is just under. Thus, it will be interesting to see how often this word is used in the Top Ten by the end of the decade.

To be certain, this merely gives us a quick peak into how the concept of money is presented in pop lyrics. Americans have lots of different ways to talk about money as a physical entity (e.g. cash, Benjamins, bills, gangster roll) that can be used to beef up subsequent searches. It will also be interesting to look at other words that frequently co-occur in songs about money (e.g., in thinking back to other searches I have done for this post, diamonds and champagne come to mind). Finally, although we've looked at the occurrence of money as an either-or problem here, we haven't dug deeper to see how money is being treated in the songs in question (e.g. as something good, bad, evil, necessary, etc.). This will take more work at the level of discourse, although the work on lexical co-occurrences will help with such an exercise.

Whatever our next step with this may be, results from the 2000s and 2010s , at the very least, should provide plenty of data. Looking ahead, the Hot 100 lists suggest that there will be plenty more data as the lyric collection expands, with titles like "Money (That's What I Want)" (1960), "For the Love of Money" (1974), "Take the Money and Run" (1976), "Mo Money Mo Problems" (1997), and "Money Maker" (2006) looming on the horizon.

Til then, videos of three of my favorite songs from this search:

The Temptations dancing and lip-synching to their hit "My Girl" in 1966

The Box Tops lip-synching their hit "The Letter" on Upbeat in 1967

Video of Steve Winwood's "Roll with It" (1988)

Donate