Songs about sex thrust themselves onto the charts

Do you ever listen to the radio and find yourself hearing song after song about sex, relationships and love? You're not alone.

Professor Gordon Gallup, of the University at Albany's psychology department, and student Dawn Hobbs recently released the results of their study on popular music laced with innuendo.

Their experiment found that 92 percent of all 174 pop songs studied contain some sort of reproductive message.

Although the amount of references varied, the results showed that the most popular and best selling songs were those that contained significant reproductive messages.

"It's more likely a song with a lot of reproductive messages will be popular, the less it has the less popular it will probably be, in most cases," Gallup said.

He also compared the results of the experiment to the news, saying that newspaper and magazine stories about rape, courtships and sex scandals always make headlines more quickly.

Also, female romance novels that contain reproductive related words such as "love," "passion" and "desire" are often more popular than those that don't, according to Gallup.

"The first song that we sampled was ‘Goldigger' by Kanye West," Hobbs said. "It has this one line about ‘18 years, 18 years, on the 18th birthday found out it wasn't his,' which was a topic of fathering and triggered more research."

An avid radio listener, Hobbs had a lot of songs in mind when the experiment began.

"I burned a ton of CDs for Gordon," she said with a smile. "You think about the sheer number of references, but when you actually count them as you listen, it's astounding."

The idea of a sexual reference in music dates back later than one would think. Operas and arias dating back hundreds of years have messages of love, courtship and sex in them.

Gallup and Hobbs found that 327 out of 362 songs had a reproductive message, a rate of nearly 90 percent.

Gallup explained that evolution is not something that only happens physically to adapt to surroundings, but in psychology as well.

"It's based on a lasting of genes, based on reproductive competition, that these themes last," he said. "It [the results] represent an inherent feature in evolutionary history, simply an expression of something that's been a part of history forever."

The experiment found that R&B songs contained the most open sexual references, or the most graphic and explicit.

Pop songs contained the more subtle references, but can be read into, while country contained the most references to marriage, love and an actual relationship.

They also found that the top three themes were sex appeal, being promiscuous and one-night stands. The Billboard charts are littered with these themes, it's The research process involved listening to many, many songs. Also, they had paper copies of the lyrics and simply read them.

They said this helped get to the message without being distracted by the singer's voice, the music and other elements that can also contribute to a song.

"It allowed a more raw and real way of looking at the songs," Gallup said. "A song can also be popular because of how the singer's voice sounds, and this way we didn't get into that."

Overall, the study has received stellar press. For example, The New York Times published an article about their research on Oct. 4.

ABC News, The Washington Post, Science News and the Daily Californian also have articles published related to the experiment.

"It's exhilarating. I am astounded with the results and happy to have finished such a big project," Hobbs said.

The study is only growing with popularity and the results are surprising and set in stone. There's no denial that sex sells.

"It's interesting to finally put a number to this idea people have had for so long, and now it's solid," Gallup said.