Evolutionary Psychology Co-Editors: Steven M. Platek, Benedict C. Jones, and Todd K. ShackelfordSong lyrics contain reproductive messages
Published 10 January, 2012Corresponding author: Gordon Gallup
Email: ggallup@albany.edu
“Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I’ll be watching you” (from Every Breath You Take, by Sting and Andy Summers, copyright 1983).
Albany, NY. Research conducted by University at Albany evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup and his student Dawn Hobbs shows that the majority of popular songs contain reproductive themes. In a large sample of current songs, they found an average of more than 10 different reproductive messages per song.
Evolution is not about survival. It’s about reproductive competition and the perpetuation of genes. Of the songs that made it into the Top Ten on 2009 Billboard charts, over 90% featured embedded, evolutionarily relevant reproductive messages. These included references to sexual intercourse, body parts, promiscuity, infidelity, sex appeal, and rejection.
Country songs contained an average of 5.9 different reproductive messages per song, with the most frequent being about parenting, commitment, rejection, and fidelity assurance. Pop songs contained 8.7 reproductive references per song, where sex appeal, reputation, short-term mating strategies, and fidelity assurance were the most common. For R&B there were 16.7 reproductive messages per song, with sex appeal, resources, sex acts, and status being the most prevalent.
A further analysis showed that across all three charts, popular songs that made it into the Top Ten contained significantly more reproductive messages than those that failed to rise to the top of the charts.
The prevalence of these messages was confirmed by Hobbs and Gallup when they extended their analysis to top selling songs over the past six decades. As further evidence for the stability and enduring nature of these embedded reproductive themes, they also analyzed opera and art songs extending back over 500 years and found many of the same reproductive references.
Consistent with reports by other investigators based on content analyses of front-page news stories and the titles of romance novels, the U Albany findings suggest that “many of the topics of central importance to human evolution and reproductive competition are a pervasive, almost ubiquitous feature of day-to-day human existence.” Popular culture is permeated with many aspects of mating psychology.
“Songs as a medium for embedded reproductive messages,” is published in Evolutionary Psychology and is available at: http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP09390416.pdf