the Rammstein Mystery: Analysing songtexts with R (1)

When we take a look at the most frequent words with a wordcloud (wordmax =20), having eliminated the stopwords, the most evident ones describe elementary states: "Lust", "Kälte", "Licht", "Mann" Within this list, "Liebe" could be surprising, being or not being an elementary state? "Herz" of symbolic quality. "America" only appears in one song.

Numerically, it looks like this:

feature frequency docfreq relative frequency relative ranking

1 liebe 46 11 0.63428098 1

2 mann 45 11 0.46447375 6

3 gut 44 18 0.48527064 4

4 komm 43 9

5 ja 43 12

6 immer 42 19 0.50531695 3

7 sonne 42 15 0.45047007

8 nacht 41 18

9 licht 39 25 0.46691763 5

10 lust 37 8 0.45877258 8

The impression changes if we do not eliminate stopwords. In this case, the most important word is "ich".

"ich" indeed appears 523 times in 66 of the 92 documents, much more often than "liebe" with 46 appearances in only 11 documents.

Together, the list with stopwords with the entire wordbag give a first impression of what Rammstein texts are about.

Commenti

Post popolari in questo blog

Till Lindemann as a Poet and with his Band (1)

Till Lindemann, lead singer of the Rammstein group, has also published some collections of poems. You should not forget: he is the son of Werner Lindemann, who used to be a prominent writer in the times of the socialist German Democratic Rebublic. As I am (together with Claudia Lisa Moeller) translating one of these books, "In stillen Nächten"/ "On Quiet Nights" (English translation by Ehren Fordyce, Raw Dog Screaming Press, Bowie MD in 2025) into Italian, I took out my R Quanteda package in order to take a more distant view on the poems. The most frequent words ("stopwords" excluded) in Lindemann's poems are "Herz" ("heart"), which appears 33 times, and "Liebe" ("love") with 26 occurrences. This might seem similar to the frequencies in Rammstein songs, where we read the leading word "Liebe" 46 times, followed by "Mann"/ man (45). We might assume that, since "Herz" is often ta...

Continua a leggere

Between Goethe and Brecht. Rammstein texts and the poems of Till Lindemann

Till Lindemann is a poet better known as the song writer and lead singer of Rammstein. It could be interesting to compare the texts band’s lyrics and his poems, maybe gaining a better insight in how both of them are made. For automated analysis, however, both kinds of texts might seem of little interest. With very short texts, the basis for statistical reasoning is too small. Indeed, we cannot reasonably apply the various readability indexes we usually employ when analyzing corpora. But if we restrict our statistical glimpse to some very elementary calculations, something similar to an “author’s footprint” might emerge. I will first use the TTR, the ratio between the number of single words (“types”) that appear in the text and the total number of words (“tokens”).Then I will have a look at the numeric relation between functional words (prepositions articles, conjunctions, etc.) and content words. Some characteristics of Till...

Continua a leggere

Co-occurrences with keyword lists

Playing R with Rammstein texts can be fun when the outcomes are unexpected, and you get plots like Gut, better. We might even see: How do we manage making "das Gute" appear? From general to keyword plots In the plot based on all the co-occurrences in Rammstein song texts, we can identify a center on the left-hand side: The meaningful central terms seem to be "Lust", "Deutschland", "Liebe", "ich", "du", "kalt" and "gut". Choosing these words as keys, we can plot a new picture. What do we see? There is a clear "ich" - "du" axis. "Liebe" appears together with "ich" and "du", well. But "Lust" seems to be mainly referred only to "ich", as well as "kalt". Into the contexts Finding "kalt" surprising, even at the border of a net with "ich", "du". "Liebe", "Lust", I searched for the occ...

Continua a leggere

Rammstein Read by the Machine

Cerca nel blog