The eyes. Other results vary across genre, for instance gospel and blues sing more about hands than eyes. And get this:
As for the genre that talks about body parts the most, hip hop takes the honors with more references than any other genre. Meanwhile, gospel refers to the body the least. There are plenty of other data points to peruse. It’s nice to know that 23.64 percent of hip hop songs refer to the behind, while 11.83 percent of rock songs talk about eyes.
Here is a summary of the results:
I’m feeling another installment from the MR minstrel.
What’s the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose,
Some say your toes,
But I think it’s your mind
ub, I was just thinking the same thing.
I think they’ve failed to tabulate metaphorical or otherwise occluded references to body parts. Grit Laskin’s “Photographer’s Ballad”, for example, should add some unmentioned (and unmentionable on a kid-friendly website) body parts to the “folk” index.
And a nearly endless supply of animals ought to do similar stuff for every other genre–like Gabriel’s “Kiss that Frog” and the Uppity Blues Women’s “Silver Beaver.”
These eyes haveseenalotoflovebutthey’llneverseeanotheronelikeIhadwith youuuu!
I don’t see “My Ding-a-ling” or “The Lemon Song” represented here.
These Eyes, Eyes without a Face, Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue, The Bluest Eyes in Texas, Angel Eyes, Eyes of a Stranger…that’s all the titles I can think of now!
Hip hop references primarily large body parts? E.g., “I like big butts”
Unfortunately, their results are actually organized by word, not by body part. If you click through to the more detailed results (or their glossary), you’ll see (for example) that 23.64% of hip hop songs mention “ass” (or “asses”), 2.77% mention “butt” (or “butts”), and 2.31% mention “booty.” Because we don’t know the overlap, the number using a word related to the behind could be anywhere from 23.64% to 28.72%. And a lot of the time the word “ass” isn’t really being used to refer to the behind; instead it’s used in phrases like “leave your ass dead” or “I’m a Southern ass star” (which does not mean that he’s an ass star from the South).
Note that Wired cropped the image at *just* the right point. The original is at FleshMap, and is *not* safe for work.
The heart seems to have been excluded from the data.
I’m a little surprised 5% of folk songs include the knee. It doesn’t seem like the sort of body part that gets glorified (Whether or not you come with a banjo on your knee.)
I won’t bore you with the full results from the folk song archive search I just did, but the quick version is: the knee isn’t being glorified in the least. It’s just a convenient body part that rhymes nicely, so there are lots of babies sitting on their mothers’ knees and things like that.
For instance:
She said, “Lord Thomas, are you blind,
Or can’t you very well see?
And don’t you see my own heart’s blood
Come running down over my knee?”
It’s just a generic indication she’s mortally wounded, there’s nothing specific about the knee at all except how it rhymes.
If you follow Brad and Anthony’s links, you’ll see that for all the graphic / web sophistication of the data presentation, the actual “study” technique is pretty lame.
Peter,
Don’t forget that a decent number of gospel songs use the King’s Olde English where ass meant donkey, I’m guessing that’s the majority of the mentions.
Easy to rhyme:
Hard to rhyme from Cole Porter’s The Physician:
New homeowners are most concerned about leaks, someone to 抓æ¼grasp Henmomianzai leakage, a good new home, can not find a good 清潔公å¸cleaning company to clean up clean. That day I had bought a 機票ticket in Paris, a house was found leaking in the morning, quickly hit a 租車taxi to find out who repair, really bad
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