You know who pop the most shit? : A study of profanity and gender differences in modern pop music

Abstract: Are there any gender differences in how profanity is used in modern pop music in 2019? The purpose of this study was to analyse music lyrics with particular attention paid to frequency and profanity profiles between female and male artists. The corpus used in the investigation contains a total of 34 music lyrics equally divided between the genders and was collected from a Billboard chart called “Hot 100 Songs”. Although this sample was small and may not be representative of all modern pop music lyrics, trends in this data show that the female artists sampled from the Billboard chart actually use profanity more frequently than male artists, which is in contrast to previous research. Furthermore, the result shows that male and female artists have distinctive profiles regarding the types of profanity used. Female artists use the swear word bitch more frequently whereas male artists tent to use nigger with a greater frequency.