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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.


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