If you are going to do a deeply nerdy bit of fan art for a band, you could do a lot worse than They Might Be Giants. David Mackenzie (@divmazie) has done the thankless and necessary work of charting the frequency of words as they appear in all 487 songs from TMBG’s more than two decades worth of studio albums. Ever wanted to know how many times the word “rocket” is used in the band’s songs? Now you don’t need to guess.
The chart is full of all sorts of intriguing facts, like that the Brooklyn-based godfathers of nerd rock sing the word monkey about 46 times as often as you would expect it to be seen in printed English, or that the band’s most frequently used word is “gonna.” Granted, I don’t think the world was exactly crying out for this sort of data to made available, but there’s no such thing as too much information, and this is a pretty worthy cause to put it to in our book.
Disappointingly, the chart does not show how many times the words “Ana” or “Ng” are used. Let’s count together, shall we?
(via Twitter)
- The video for the latest single, “Nanobots,” is pretty nifty
- Here is “Particle Man” in flowchart form
- Listening to TMBG is the thrill of, like, a lot of my days
