Violence, Acoustic Drums and Morgan Wallen

Some bite sized insights

Violence As Lyrical Theme

According to the chart below, there is more violence in songs that appear on the Billboard Hot 100 than there was 5 years ago. Violence is one of many lyrical content themes and often appears in combination with other themes in my tracking system. If you’re new, you can find details about me and this data project here. Fluctuations aside, there is a clear rise in the prevalance of this lyrical theme.

While this warrants a deeper dive, I’m just going to let the simplicity of this high level insight land on its own. For now.

Acoustic Drums Are More Popular

With an even greater gain in popularity over the same period of time, is the use of Acoustic Drums. In the era of modern recording the use of Acoustic Drums has sometimes been thought of as a pain and a luxury. They required access to expensive gear and took time and expertise to use well. And while the first generation of virtual instrument drum plugins often couldn’t compete with the sound of the real thing, perhaps this increase in the presense of acoustic drum texture is in part due to an increase in the quality of these plugins?

Morgan Wallen’s Drums

Building off the drum insights above, here is what my custom ChatGPT found when I asked it to examine the relationship between Morgan Wallen’s use of drum texture and his chart performance.

This chart combines Morgan Wallens average chart performance (the dotted black line) with the make up of the drum textures used in his songs at that time (the different area colours).

An interesting relationship emerges over this time period. Initally, as he diversifies his usage of drum texture to include more electronic drums, his chart performance improves. And then later on this relationship inverts. His use of more electronic drums correlates to a decline in chart performance, while his chart performance improves when he uses more acoustic drums.

Hmmmm…. What could be going on here?

Let me know if you find any of these worthy of a deeper dive! Personally I find all three intruiging. And maybe some of them even a bit concerning.