How Much "Love" and How Much "Sex" Have Americans Sung About in the Past 60 Years? | QDaily Business History

The songs are about love and sex — and, seen from another angle, they are a history of American society.

Who can't hum a few bars of a love song? Pop music can even give you the illusion that nothing else exists: love you can't have, love you've lost, love that burns, love that's shallow, love you're not sure you should feel at all... Love — and, more bluntly, sex — is art's eternal subject. It is everywhere, and singing about it seems the easiest thing in the world, even when nobody is listening.

Not long ago, Billboard published a report on love and sex by the numbers (you can read the original here). It took the 100 most popular chart songs of every year since the 1950s and counted how often "love" and "sex" turn up in them. What we find interesting is that this isn't only a music archive — it is American social and cultural history in miniature.

Put simply: were Americans willing to talk about sex openly from the start? Why have Black artists been more willing than white ones to sing about it? Did people sing less about love in wartime? And so on. If someone ran the same study on Chinese music, the results would probably hit closer to home.

Here are a few of the takeaways.

Love is everywhere, but people's feelings about it keep swinging

By the count, love has been musicians' favorite subject for decades running. Since 1960, songs on the US Billboard Hot 100 have mentioned the word "love" at least 10,000 times a year.

Ten thousand times a year sounds staggering. But people's feelings about love run hot and cold and are hard to pin down — exactly like love itself.

Through the whole of the 1960s, love held flat. Then 1975 looks like a turning point: that year, mentions of love in Billboard songs jumped 50%.

After that people seemed to grow more and more infatuated, and love came up more and more often. The fever peaked in 1988, when "love" was mentioned 25,000 times in Billboard songs.

Then, as with most love affairs, the ardor cooled. "Love" turned up less and less. By 2014, mentions of it in these songs had fallen back to 1960s levels.

1975 was a turning point for love. It was also an important year in American history for another reason: the Vietnam War ended.

The link between the two is subtle. Put simply, once US troops had pulled out of Indochina entirely, soldiers came home from a terrible battlefield to ordinary life. The antiwar movement ended along with the war, and the students and citizens who had marched went back to school and to work. The mood of the whole society gradually loosened out of the tension of the antiwar years.

That looser atmosphere gave love room to flourish. Otherwise big words like "nation," "justice" and "peace" would keep pulling hot-blooded young people to spend their passion on a cause instead — as the old lines have it, life is dear and love is dearer, but for freedom's sake both can be given up.

Every era expresses love in its own way

Love may come up more than 10,000 times a year, but the ways Americans talk about it differ enormously from decade to decade.

In the 1950s and '60s, musicians declared love in a register that now reads as pure sentimental melodrama. Tony Bennett's biggest hit of 1951, "Because of You," has him singing that because of you the sun shines, and the moon and the stars say you belong to me and we will never part.

Dean Martin's 1956 single "Memories Are Made of This" puts it tenderly: a girl, a boy, a little sorrow, a little joy — that is what memories are made of. The song hit the Billboard Hot 100 the moment it came out, sat at number one for six weeks, then crossed the Atlantic and spent four straight weeks at the top of the UK singles chart.

These lyrics carry an echo of the Romantic literary tradition, but from where we stand now they are more than a little cloying.

Look at how American musicians express love today and no single word will cover it.

Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" shows a "fearless" attitude toward love: yes, there is a long list of exes (because I'm bad at this), but I'm not giving up — there is always a blank space where I can write your name.

Justin Bieber's "What Do You Mean?" is about love's frustrations — the irritation and helplessness of being worn down trying to read what the other person wants.

Then there is Maroon 5's "Animals," the inner voice of a lover whose need for control has curdled into something pathological.

In short, in these lyrics musicians no longer take a single romantic, idealizing line on love. They show something far more varied.

What that reflects is a much larger shift in how American society as a whole regards love.

In the 1950s and '60s, love was still tied tightly to marriage and family, so it meant a lifelong promise and a lifelong investment. By the 21st century love had become more a matter of passion, a private expression of feeling — and both the ways of expressing it and the attitudes toward it grew steadily more complicated.

Love can also be a cover for sex

When we talk about love, we are not necessarily talking about love itself. Musicians use the word the same way, and Madonna is the prime example.

Madonna carries a fascinating split. The cold numbers say she is the artist most devoted to love: more Billboard songs about love than anyone else, and pitifully few about sex.

Yet her steamy photographs and live shows say it plainly — here is a sexual woman who knows how to use her charisma to win everyone over, men and women alike.

The split shows most clearly in her signature song "Like a Virgin." It sketches a scene: a girl meets a boy, and love at first sight hits so hard that she feels returned to the age when desire first stirred.

But to describe that first stirring, the line Madonna chose is "like a virgin." That one plain comparison gives the whole song its seductive pull.

So it is genuinely hard to say whether the song is about love or about sex. It is not as chaste as a 1950s love song or a weepy romance drama, and not as crude as pornography. It sits between Platonic love and plain sex.

The reason for that middle ground is that American society had been through the shock of the sexual revolution, but conservative values were still strong — much as Playboy, after all its years in print, was still dismissed by many moral guardians as something not fit for polite company.

Living in that environment, Madonna could not escape the chains of her era either. She could present herself as sexy, but if the songs were equally explicit the moral guardians would not have let her off. So she used love as her subject to balance an image the era judged "too sexy."

And that blur between love and sex is exactly where her appeal lies. As she told Vanity Fair in a 1992 interview: "Love isn't sex and sex isn't love. But when the two come together, it becomes the most magical thing of all."

Thanks to the sexual revolution and the hippies, sex became a subject of its own

Next to Madonna's shuttling between love and sex, songs about sex alone are a much smaller niche — but one that has grown fast over the years.

In the 1960s, musicians did not sing about "sex" much. From 1970 a clear upward trend appears. By the 21st century, "sex" came up in songs more often in a single year than in the whole of the 1960s put together.

That growing openness about "sex" lines up closely with the timeline of America's sexual revolution.

Sexual liberation is a sprawling subject: the women's movement, gay rights, the pill, abortion and much else. What bears on sex in music is the idea at its center — that sex should not be treated as taboo, but as a right people are born with.

Credit for pushing that idea into everyday life goes largely to the hippies.

These young people prized freedom, feeling and love, and they carried that attitude into love and sex. As they saw it, so long as you were willing, you could make love with whoever you liked, however you liked, whenever you liked.

That attitude fused with the swelling movement against the Vietnam War. Set against a sinful war, the hippies thought, sex was pure. So they coined the famous slogan — "Make Love, Not War." John Lennon later wrote the line into his song "Mind Games," and it was sung everywhere for a time.

So the idea of free love, carried along on the era's hatred of war and politics, swept across America. For a growing share of people, sex was no longer taboo.

The people singing about sex are still mostly Black

Compared with love songs, far more of the artists singing about sex are Black. Historically, most of the musicians best known for writing sex into their songs have been Black as well.

In 1964, Motown, a label built on Black R&B, released 60 singles, 19 of which reached number one, and a good many of them touched on sex in the lyrics.

In 1973 Marvin Gaye put out an album containing the single "You Sure Love to Ball" — the title alone tells you what the song is a metaphor for. Gaye has long been regarded as a pioneer who kept pushing how far music could go on the subject of sex.

By the 1990s, hip-hop had become a mainstream style in pop music. Because it grew out of the street and was looser and freer, its lyrics observed almost no taboos, and sexual content was plentiful.

Whether it is James Brown and Tom Jones in the '50s and '60s or Bruno Mars and the Black Eyed Peas in the new century, Black artists have looked more willing to sing about sex.

There are cultural reasons for this, and social ones.

Start with culture. The US may look like an open, plural country today, but in its early years it was shaped mainly by white Puritan culture, which opposed abortion, opposed homosexuality and even opposed sex. That culture is now deeply rooted in American society, and it forms the country's conservative wing.

Black Americans, who sat at the bottom of the social order then, had a wholly different culture, with far fewer prohibitions. Their living conditions were mostly poor, so there was little room for propriety either — think of the jazz that grew out of Black New Orleans. The city's many brothels, gambling houses and pleasure venues gave Black workers a great deal of employment. Music made in that setting naturally carried a lot of sex in it.

On one side, white Americans bound by Puritan ethics; on the other, Black Americans whose lives were miserable but not policed by the same code. Naturally there was more sex in Black music.

Credit for turning that content into mainstream popular culture goes to the civil rights movement.

The movement did more than advance political equality between Black and white Americans. It pushed Black Americans to look hard at their own culture and to work it into the mainstream. Its leaders held that music was one of the most important parts of Black culture, so it was necessary to make Black music a style every American recognized.

It was in that reckoning with Black culture that the music was preserved as it was, sex among its main subjects included. That is why Black artists hold such a large place among the musicians singing about sex today.

Talking about sex is still a male privilege — but it seems to have nothing to do with age

Among the artists with the most songs about sex, men hold an overwhelming lead. In the 1960s, only two women — Evie Sands and Barbara Lewis — made the top ten singers of sex. In the new century it is still only two: Christina Aguilera and Nicki Minaj.

Part of the reason may be Madonna's. Women can show their sexual appeal by other means, so in the lyrics they can only balance it with something more oblique, to keep the moral guardians off them.

But why can men talk about sex in music openly while women are held down for it? Why does this society let a woman display her appeal with her body, but not talk about sex? At bottom it is still gender inequality.

As for age and sex, most people assume teenagers are impulsive and that sex comes to mind most when they are miserable — but youth seems to have little to do with singing about it.

Take one artist: when the rapper Eminem released his first album in 1996, it already had songs about sex. By 2009 his albums still did.

And across the board there is no evidence that the musicians singing love songs in a given era were any older than those singing about sex.

Next to love, sex is still a marginal subject

Even though love songs have been declining and sex songs rising over the past 40 years, "love" still appears in Billboard songs far more often than "sex."

The two are not even the same order of magnitude. By the report's figures, in 2014 the word "love" appeared in Billboard songs close to 10,000 times; "sex" appeared about 1,000 times.

That is not hard to understand. Psychologically, the sexual revolution is long past and most people no longer treat sex as a moral question. But plenty of them still feel sex belongs in the bedroom rather than in public — or at least that the room we allow for talking about sex is narrower than the room we allow for love.

One result of that delicate frame of mind: outside an industry like pornography, which sells sex outright, sex tends not to sell. R-rated films in the US (the 18-and-over rating) usually take less at the box office than PG-13 films, which children under 13 may watch with a parent's guidance. So Hollywood studios do everything they can to get their films rated PG-13 instead of R.

Music works the same way. When lyrics carry too much sex, all sorts of people step forward to say the songs "harm the healthy development of children and teenagers" — in the US as much as anywhere.

To avoid that trouble, record labels simply adopted self-censorship: classifying lyric content, sending back lyrics judged too explicit or too violent for revision, and putting warning labels on CD and cassette packaging.

Even so, some people find the measures too weak, and keep going after the labels with moral condemnation.

So next to love, sex remains a marginal subject.

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