92 percent of Top Ten Billboard songs are about sex

A staggering 92 percent of songs that made it into Billboard’s Top Ten in 2009 contain lyrics built on “reproductive themes,” according to a new study by the State University of New York–Albany.

The authors of the study, called “Songs as a medium for embedded reproductive messages,” wrote the following:

[W]e examined the song lyrics from three Billboard charts: Country, Pop, and R&B. A content analysis of the lyrics revealed 18 reproductive themes that read like an outline for a course in evolutionary psychology. Approximately 92 percent of the 174 songs that made it into the Top Ten in 2009 contained one or more reproductive messages, with an average of 10.49 reproductive phrases per song. Although differences in the frequency of different themes between charts were found, further analyses showed that the most popular/bestselling songs contained significantly more reproductive messages.

Among the 18 lyrical categories designated in the report were “arousal,” “short-term mating strategies,” “sexual prowess,” and “genitalia.” The R&B genre led the pack in terms of how many of such references were contained in a given song.

Back in 1964, educator Herbert W. Armstrong discussed in his book The Missing Dimension in Sex why themes in popular music and other fields of entertainment were becoming so sexually charged:

Few people stop to realize to what extent the teenagers have taken over. … Who determines what is “popular music” today? The “teens.” … Adolescents determine dancing trends, motion-picture themes, radio formats, and even advertisements and most fields of entertainment! What many do not realize is that this teenage influence on the whole society is predominantly sexual influence. There is much more intense preoccupation with sex during these years than in later maturity.

The new study by the State University of New York–Albany proves that Mr. Armstrong’s assessment of the U.S.’s entertainment industry was both accurate and prescient. If adolescent influence was infusing pop culture with sexually-focused content back in 1964, how much more so now, when 92 percent of chart-toppers are filled with sexual references?

To understand the long-term implications of our increasingly adolescent-dominated culture, order a free copy of The Missing Dimension in Sex.