Here in the Her Towers we are partial to a bit of cheesy music, when we say a bit, what we really mean is that on a regular basis we like to put on our NOW That’s What I Call Music! cassette tapes and reminisce of the days when crimped hair was on trend and wedged jelly shoes were in fashion.
What’s more cheddar cheese than 90s boy band hits? Nothing, that’s what.
The folk over at fivethirtyeight.com decided to take a look back at the lyrical genius of boy bands from the 90s and appreciate their extensive* use of the English language.
Taking some of the most well known boy band tracks, they calculated how many times the same words appeared throughout each song, and you may have already guessed it but those guys were constantly singing about ‘you and I‘.
Despite the fact that ‘the’ is the most commonly used word in the English language, the most common word found in the lyrics is ‘you’ totalling in at 10,378.
Not stopping their search there, they continued to tally up two, three and four-word phrases.
Needless to say ‘oh, oh, oh’, ‘na na na na’ and ‘I love you’ are in the top places.
Now for some home grown 90s cheese…
Boyzone, we still love you, love you for a reason, let the reason be love.
*Limited, bless them – it was very, very limited.
