Visual artists Fernanda Vigas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre. The result: An interactive graphic work called “Listen" that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project. Clicking on each genre brings up a more detailed representation of its chief bodily concerns.
“Listen investigates the relationship between language and the body," reads one sentence of the project's manifesto. “Verbal manifestations of human physicality in music, poetry and religion are distilled to their basic elements." By presenting those elements in such an intuitive way, Vigas and Wattenberg bring data to life graphically, so that it can be grasped in seconds.
So, what do the results tell us? Across all of the categories, the eyes are most frequently mentioned body part (Hall & Oates, “Private Eyes"), with the exceptions of hip hop, which places a firm emphasis on the posterior (Sir Mix a Lot, “Baby Got Back") and blues (Louisiana Red, “Keep Your Hands Off My Woman") and gospel music (The Gospel, “Put Your Hands Together"), which are respectively focused on the keeping off of one's hands and the clapping or raising of one's hands.
