Analyzing all known Metal lyrics with natural language processing

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To prevent us being skewed by rare words, we take only words which occur at least five times in each corpus.

At least five metal songs had the word fiscal in them? Anyone know which ones?

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Maybe just one metal song on economics, mentioning “fiscal” five times.

It might even have used all the other least-metal words. And now I really want to hear it.
#Approximately! Residential! \m/

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Given the plethora of Christian metal bands over the years, I’d be surprised if there weren’t some Randian ones too. It’s a broad church, as it were.

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Any LaVeyan Satanists would also be Objectivists, so you’re not far off.

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“The Eurocrats - From Brussels with Love” should be one of them : )

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http://www.somethingawful.com/your-band-sucks/metal/

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I love that the least metal words all line up into two categories:

  1. words that express uncertainty
  2. words used to describe university administration

Fiscal! FISCAL!! DAdaDAdaDAdaDADAAA!

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My wife works in university administration. She thinks her workload could be expressed in metal lyrics.

1 burn 3.81
2 cries 3.63
3 veins 3.59
4 eternity 3.56
5 breathe 3.54
6 beast 3.54
7 gonna 3.53
8 demons 3.53
9 ashes 3.51
10 soul 3.40
11 sorrow 3.40
12 sword 3.38
13 goodbye 3.28
14 dreams 3.28
15 gods 3.24
16 pray 3.22
17 reign 3.15
18 tear 3.12
19 flames 3.12
20 scream 3.11

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So here’s my attempt at the most metal lyric possible, using the top 20 most metal words from this data set:

beast cries, demons tear veins
gods breathe flames, eternity scream
pray sorrow, sword gonna reign
goodbye soul, ashes burn dreams

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I am fond of the tech-death band “Allegaeon”.

They write songs about science and atheism, and play 8 and 9 string guitars. Super nerdy stuff.

“Gravimetric Time Dilation”! Lol

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*thrashing orchestral guitar solo follows*

#\m/

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dataset of lyrics to 222,623 songs by 7,364 metal bands


There are 222,000 metal songs? And I thought Trump was a threat.

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Even just the syllable count seems to make a difference. One reason why it seems to be easier to say things (especially sharp things) about Liberals (effectively 2 syllables to many people) than it is about Conservatives.

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But it’s super easy to say sharp things about Trumpies


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University chairman relatively literary,
Employee’s membership considerable!
Fiscal measurements approximately noted,
Academic residential committee secretary!!!
Committeeeeee secretaryyyyyy!!!

RAHHHHHHHH!!!

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And then you have outliers like Mike Patton:

A lion tamer yelling, your first piano lesson
A 4-leaf contraceptive, we play a game of
(Paper, scissors, rock)

(Patton collaborated with DEP while the band was in-between vocalists.)

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A lot of the Least Metal Words might be the Most Smiths Words. I hear them in Morrissey’s voice, at any rate.

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Forgot one.

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Needs an umlaut.

#BRÜTAL

ETA There’s a Wikipedia article on this
 Go figure.

ETA 2 it’s funny how when you pronounce some of those band names literally how dumb they sound.

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