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Now, That’s What I Effing Call Music: Singing, Rapping, and Cussing on the Billboard Hot 100, 1958–2025

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Swearing has moved from the margins of the music industry to the mainstream. Male artists have historically cursed more than female artists, but over time women have closed the gap and, in some cases, surpassed the level of male profanity. I measured swearing in the lyrics of 27,614 Billboard Hot 100 songs that first charted between 1958 and 2025, from 6,059 lead artists, using a tiered word list checked line by line and against second lyric sources. In raw terms, men swear more across eras, but women have gained quickly in relative terms. Women’s songs were 38% as likely as men’s to contain a strong or moderate swear in the 1990s; that jumped to 73% as likely in 2020–25. What remains of the gap largely reflects genre composition. By 2020–25, 65% of men’s hits came from rap artists (the most frequently swearing genre), against 17% of women’s. Holding the genre mix fixed tells a different story. By the 2020s, women’s songs were about 22% more likely than men’s to contain a swear, and they used nearly twice as many swears per word. Inside rap, women’s songs carried swears about as often as men’s in the 1990s and more frequently since 2010. Outside rap, women also passed men in the 2010s and reached about twice men’s rate in the 2020s. From 1958 to 1989, using a measure built on milder words (“damn” and expletive “hell”), men led women by about 2 to 1. Earlier studies of lyrics disagree about which gender swears more in music; differences in genre mix offer a plausible reason.
DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/9tjf6_v1
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225816725
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