The Battle for Britain ... and America

Are there aspects of Bowie’s lyrics that can predict how long an album will stay in the charts? And, if so, are these the same both the UK and the US or do different psychological processes in Bowie’s albums predict chart success in the two countries?

In this analysis I combined all the songs in each album and ran the LIWC on the albums rather than on the individual songs.

Information on the number of weeks spent in the charts in the UK and the US is taken from David Buckley’s excellent “David Bowie: The Complete Guide to His Music”. The book was updated in 2004 so includes all 26 of Bowie’s studio albums. However, information on the number of weeks spent in the UK and US charts is missing for David Bowie (album 1) and Buddha of Suburbia (album 21) and is also missing for the number of weeks spent in the US charts for Space Oddity (album 2). [Footnote 1]

There is a very high correlation [Footnote 2] between the number of weeks spent in the UK charts and the number of weeks spent in the US charts [Footnote 3]. The five albums spending the fewest weeks in the UK charts are exactly the same as the five albums spending the fewest weeks in the US charts. These are: Tin Machine II, 1. Outside, Earthling, …hours and Reality.

On the other hand, only two albums, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Let’s Dance, appear amongst the five longest charting albums in both countries. Nevertheless, there are a number of differences in what aspects of language predict the length of time spent in each of these charts.

The table below shows the size of the correlations between word categories and the number of weeks spent in the charts. The asterisks (*) indicate the level of significance (the more asterisks there are, the stronger the correlation). I’ve included all the correlations where there is a significant association with the number of weeks spent in at least one of the charts. This allows us to see similarities and differences in the psychological processes that predict the number of weeks spent in the UK versus the US charts.

Table 1: Word categories correlated with number of weeks spent in the UK and US charts

Social, Motion and Positive Emotion

In the UK albums spend longer in the charts if they contain more words relating to social processes but fewer weeks in the charts if they contain more words relating to motion (words relating to motion … that’s essentially Lodger, isn’t it?). What are the implications of this? Do we British Bowie fans like socialising but can’t be bothered to get off our arses to go out? Maybe we prefer our friends to come round to visit us rather than us going out to socialise?

In the US, on the other hand, albums spend longer in the charts if they contain more words relating to positive emotions. Positive emotion words are a broad category and include things like wisdom, value and virtue. A subcategory of positive emotion words is positive feelings such as affection, care, joy, laugh and romance and if we look at this specific subcategory of words we find an even stronger correlation with the number of weeks spent in the US charts [Footnote 4]. 

Death and Senses

Using words relating to death predicts spending fewer weeks in the charts in both the UK and the US. So if Bowie doesn’t want to kill off an album he needs to cut out the death words. Obviously there is some variation in terms of the relationship between death words and spending fewer weeks in the charts because off the top of my head The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which includes the fantastic Brel-inspired “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” (it was essentially Bowie’s version of “Jef”), spent 174 weeks in the UK charts and 72 weeks in the US charts while Scary Monsters, which includes the equally fantastic reflection-on-Space-Oddity “Ashes to Ashes”, spent 32 weeks in the UK charts and 27 weeks in the US charts. These are obviously exceptions to the rule.

But anyway, we also don’t seem to like references to physical senses in Bowie’s albums – in fact, if we analyse this in more detail and look at the specific sense it’s touching words that turn off both the British and the Americans [Footnote 5].

The use of death and touching words is actually very small across all albums. As a percentage of the total words in each album they range from 0% to 0.7% for death and from 0.1% to 1.3% for touching. So these words are quite uncommon in Bowie albums. Nevertheless, they still seem to have a significant negative effect on album sales.

So what does it all mean?

Words relating to social processes, death and negative emotion have been shown in some studies to relate to depression. Specifically, poets who went on to commit suicide were more likely than non-suicidal poets to use more death words, more negative emotion words and fewer social process words. So might the fact that Bowie's albums spend less time in the charts if they use more death words, fewer social process words and fewer positive emotion words simply indicate that albums that reflect depression are less successful than those that don't?

Possibly. That would be a very neat explanation although it wouldn't explain the effect of motion and touching words.

I don't want to give everyting away all at one but actually the analysis I present in the next chapter, "How low is Low?", seems to contradict this explanation. Low was recorded when David Bowie was very depressed but the lyrics in that album use the same number of positive emotion words as all his other albums combined and does not refer to death at all. In other words, use of death words and emotion words does not seem to be indicative of depression in Bowie's work.

Interestingly, the psychological literature on disgust may also be relevant here. Disgust is one of the six basic emotions and its function is to help us avoid things that are potentially “contaminating”, socially as well as physically. Disgust is an emotion of avoidance – we avoid disgusting people and things (for fear of contamination) and we avoid doing things that disgust other people for fear of shame, humiliation and rejection (this is a general rule … certain niche markets for certain niche practices notwithstanding).

Paul Rozin is a psychologist who has probably done the most work on disgust (although I’ve published several papers on this myself) and he suggests that, broadly speaking, things that disgust us are those things that remind us that we are animals, in particular death, the body and faeces. Words relating to faeces are not measured by the LIWC. Off the top of my head the only time I remember faeces appearing in an album is on Diamond Dogs (“defecating ecstasy” in Sweet Thing) and, in fact, this album was ranked 7th in terms of length of time spent in the charts in both the UK and the US and so it did pretty well (in spite of references to shitting).

Still, two out of three ain’t bad. And even minimal references to death and touching seem to put off the record-buying public, at least in Bowie’s case (not sure about Leonard Cohen or the Sisters of Mercy).

But like the above discussion on depression, this account is also not complete since it wouldn't explain why social processes, positive emotions and motion words relate to time spent in the charts. Maybe the best explanation would be a combination of the two, depression and disgust.

But how would these emotions, depression and disgust, influence the record-buying public?

One possibility is that we respond to the emotions inherent in the albums. Plausible. Obviously the songs from each album that are played on the radio or released as singles influence whether we buy the album and, assuming that they are representative of the album, perhaps we are influenced into not buying the album when words relating to death, motion and touch are used and when words relating to social processes and positive emotions are not. Alternatively, perhaps those of us who buy these albums early tell other fans not to bother.

Another possibility is that these albums may capture Bowie in the kind of mood that is not conducive to effective marketing of the album, either because he can't be bothered to promote it at all or else because the promotion is ill thought out and any tour that he does for this album is rubbish. Again, plausible.

Yet another possibility is that these are all chance associations and there is no real relationship between the psychological content of the lyrics of Bowie albums and the degree of chart of success. You can never rule out this possibility.

However, there is another explanation that seems to explain all this better but I'm not going to talk about that here. You'll have to wait until I've written the chapter, "Time May Change Me".

Implications

In the meantime, I guess the implications are, David, if you want to spend longer in the charts here are some words you should (or should not) think about using.

Table 2. Words Bowie should and shouldn't use in order to stay in the charts longer

N.B. This table contains only a selection of the words in each category. It is not exhaustive.


Footnotes

Footnote 1: David Buckley’s book also includes information on highest chart position but I’ve only explored the number of weeks spent in the charts . The reason for this is that there is too little variation in UK chart position. Out of the 25 albums for which I have this information, 7 were Number 1, a further 11 were Top 5 and a further 3 were Top 10. One reached 17, one reached 23, one reached 26 and one reached 87. In contrast, for the 24 albums for which I have the same information for the US chart, four were Top 10, a further seven were Top 20, a further eight were Top 40 and one more each at 47, 75, 93, 105 and 126. Although the correlation can be made for the US there is no equivalent correlation that can be made for the UK for comparison.

Footnote 2: I used Spearman correlations (because weeks in charts was not continuous) and ranked albums from the shortest to longest time spent in the charts rather than actual number of weeks (although, in fact, it makes absolutely no difference to the results whether you use weeks or rank because that's what the Spearman's test does anyway).

Footnote 3: ρ = .66, p < .001

Footnote 4: ρ = .63, p < .001; the correlation for weeks spent in the UK charts is ρ = .27, p = ns. Yanks clearly want the feel-good factor from their Bowie albums

Footnote 5: The respective correlations for the number of weeks spent in the British and American charts are -.55** and -.51* respectively.