RUNNING THE WORLD
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
-
Based on our analysis of the song's visual and lyrical content, as well as comparisons to existing feminist theories, what reasons are there for gender inequality?
-
What are the common themes transmitted by today's popular songs?
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
THESIS STATEMENT
We believe that a majority of the recent popular songs portray the genders unequally, therefore resulting in misogynistic content.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
RATIONALE
-
There have been popular songs that hold extremely sexist views, such as the infamous “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke
-
How can such offensive songs become so popular?
-
We want to find out whether there is a relationship between popular songs and the messages they carry
SIGNIFICANCE
-
Lack of existing in-depth research into the lyrical and visual content of a song and how they portray women when they exist in tandem.
-
Few existing papers compare what is being shown to viewers (i.e. in a music video) compared to what is being sung in the song.
-
Thus, we wanted to add to the field of research regarding this topic.
-
We analysed these songs’ lyrical content and, if applicable, their music videos (from the use of screengrabs). This allowed us to:
-
Conclude the intended messages of the songs
-
Link to existing feminist theories
-
Find disjuncts between lyrical and visual content
-
Conclude whether the song portrays women in a negative light
-
-
The YouTube view counts for the music video and the Spotify play count of each song were recorded
-
After completing our analyses, we plotted
-
Matrices
-
To better track how misogynistic or empowering a song is in relation to its year
-
-
Bar Graphs
-
To show the trend in themes we found to be the most important to the issue of misogyny
-
-
SCOPE
For this project, our scope consisted of the Top 15 songs from the 2013 to 2016 editions of the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 music charts. Our country of focus was thus the United States of America.
​
We focused on Semiotics and mainly used a Feminist Criticism Lens in our analyses.