Introduction

This report is an exploration of the band The Chicks (formally known as the Dixie Chicks). I will be analyzing the lyrics of their eight studio albums. In 2003, days before the invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks found themselves in a controversy sparked by a comment that was made by a member of the group. Natalie Maines stated that the band did not endorse the war and were “ashamed” that the sitting US President, George W. Bush, was from Texas. These remarks triggered boycotts in the US and gained major backlash from country listeners, who were mostly right-wing and supported the war. For this reason, the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted by thousands of country radio stations. The band took a hiatus and in 2020, they renamed themselves “The Chicks” as the word “Dixie” has negative connotations. In 2020 The Chicks released their first album in 14 years called Gaslighter. The information I’ve obtained in regard to the controversy can be accessed through this Wikipedia page.

Hypothesis

I will be looking at the sentiment of The Chicks albums to see the change in sentiment of the lyrics between their first six albums, which were released before the controversy and the two albums that were released after. My hypothesis is that there will be more words with a positive sentiment in the albums after the controversy. I believe that the last two albums The Chicks released will be more focused on rising up and feeling empowered lyrically.

The name change from The Dixie Chicks to The Chicks was caused by the word “Dixie” being in reference to the American Mason-Dixon line. This was the invisible boundary that separated the free Northern states from the slave-owning Southern states. The band wanted to distance themselves from connotations of American slavery. I am also hypothesizing that The Chicks lyrics in the last two albums will be more cautious lyrically in regard to speaking about religion and politics and that they will try to get across more positive messaging. Lastly, I will be looking at the types of words in their lyrics and I hypothesize that the commonality of feminist words or words that are associated with the female empowerment movement will increase in the last two albums versus the first six.

Methodology:

Using the package genius, I am going to be downloading each album from The Chicks. I used this Wikipedia page, in order to be sure I had all eight of their studio albums included. I started off this process by grouping together the six albums before the controversy and the two albums after the controversy into separate data frames. I used the Wordcloud package to visualize any patterns or trends in the most commonly used words. This step was important in helping to solve for my hypothesis. I then found the top 10 words in each of the data frames and began looking into the sentiment of top words to find out if it was more positive or negative in the first set of albums or the second. To get a better sense of sentiment I used AFINN. The AFINN lexicon assigns words with a score that runs between -5 and 5, with negative scores indicating negative sentiment and positive scores indicating positive sentiment. Once again, I split the albums based off of release date. If it was released before 2003, I used the album in the first visualization and if it released after it was included in the second visualization. The last series of visualizations were meant to show a shift in topics The Chicks included in their lyrics. Based off of a variety of sources which provided words commonly associated with patriotism, feminism, politics, and religion I was able to create a lexicon of words and test the frequency those words had been used against each of the data frames.

library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext)
library(genius)
library(textdata)
library(wordcloud2)
library(ggplot2)
library(tibble)
library(textdata)
library(tokenizers)
library(magrittr)
library(purrr)
library(syuzhet)
library(circlize)
library(reshape2)
library(tm)

Top Words of The Chicks Albums Before and After Controversy

Top Words in The Dixie Chicks Album Before 2003

library(viridisLite)
library(ggthemes)
library(RColorBrewer)
RdBu <- brewer.pal(8, "RdBu")
ChicksLyricsBefore <- TheChicksBefore %>% 
  add_genius(artist, title, type = "album")
data("stop_words")
ChicksLyricsBefore %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  ungroup() %>% 
  head(200) %>% 
  wordcloud2(demoFreq, size = .6, shape = 'star', color = RdBu, backgroundColor = "gray") 
ChicksLyricsBefore %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>%
  head(10) -> Beforetop10

Beforetop10 %>% 
ggplot(aes(reorder(word, -n), n, fill=word)) + geom_col() + scale_fill_brewer(palette = "RdBu") +
  theme(legend.position="none") + theme_gray() + ggtitle("Top 10 Words of Dixie Chicks Albums Before 2003") + labs(y= "Number of Appearances", x = "Words")

Top Words in The Chicks Albums After 2003

ChicksLyricsAfter %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  head(200) %>% 
  wordcloud2(demoFreq, size = .4, shape = 'star', color = RdBu, backgroundColor = "grey") 
## Joining, by = "word"
ChicksLyricsAfter %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>%
  head(10) -> Aftertop10
## Joining, by = "word"
Aftertop10 %>% 
ggplot(aes(reorder(word, -n), n, fill=word)) + geom_col() + scale_fill_brewer(palette = "RdBu") +
  theme(legend.position="none") + theme_gray() + ggtitle("Top 10 Words of Dixie Chicks Albums After 2003") + labs(y= "Number of Appearances", x = "Words")

library(devtools)
devtools::install_github('lchiffon/wordcloud2')
## Skipping install of 'wordcloud2' from a github remote, the SHA1 (8a12a3b6) has not changed since last install.
##   Use `force = TRUE` to force installation
library(wordcloud2)
force = TRUE

What This Tells Us:

Utilizing the Wordcloud was an important step in understanding the frequency and importance of the most common words in the six Chicks albums before the controversy in 2003 and then two albums that followed their hiatus. While Wordcloud is typically not used to create actionable insights, it was valuable to see the trends in word usage and help to identify words that led to the next topic of exploration, which is the usage of patriotic, feminist, religious, and political words. I noticed in the lyrics in the first six albums there were words used like “free”, “god”, “soldier”, “Texas”, “devil”, “heaven”, “pray”, “godspeed”, etc. Those words stuck out to me in the Wordcloud and so to further examine this theory, I looked at the top 200 words in The Chicks lyrics before 2003 and after 2003. In the lyrics after 2003, it was rare to find mentions of words with a religious or political connotation. Another interesting aspect upon examining the top 10 most commonly used words was that the word “love” appeared more in the first six albums than the last two. However, the word “hope” had the second largest number of appearances in the data frame post 2003. This led to the exploration of the sentiment of each of the words used to see which grouping of albums had words that are more positive and negative. It also was a step in further confirming my hypothesis that the last two albums would be more encompassing of themes such as rising up against adversity or staying hopeful for the future.

Using AFINN to Analyze Sentiment of Albums

The following plots will show the sentiments of commonly used words in The Chicks albums pre and post 2003 controversy.

ChicksLyricsBefore <- TheChicksBefore %>% 
  add_genius(artist, title, type = "album")
data("stop_words")
SentimentBefore <- ChicksLyricsBefore %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  head(20) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(word, n)) + geom_col ()

SentimentBefore <- ChicksLyricsBefore %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  inner_join(get_sentiments("afinn"))
  
SentimentBefore %>% 
  head(20) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(reorder(word, n), n, fill=value)) + 
  geom_col() +
  coord_flip() +
  ylab("Number of Occurrences") +
  xlab("Lyrics") +
  ggtitle("Sentiment of Dixie Chicks Lyrics Before 2003 Controversy")

TheChicksAfter <- tribble(
  ~artist, ~title,
  "Dixie Chicks", "Taking The Long Way",
  "Dixie Chicks", "Gaslighter",
)
ChicksLyricsAfter <- TheChicksAfter %>% 
  add_genius(artist, title, type = "album")
data("stop_words")
SentimentAfter <- ChicksLyricsAfter %>%
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>% 
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  head(20) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(word, n)) + geom_col ()

SentimentAfter <- ChicksLyricsAfter %>% 
  unnest_tokens(word, lyric) %>% 
  anti_join(stop_words) %>%
  count(word, sort = TRUE) %>% 
  inner_join(get_sentiments("afinn"))

SentimentAfter %>% 
  head(20) %>% 
  ggplot(aes(reorder(word, n), n, fill=value)) + 
  geom_col() +
  coord_flip() +
  scale_color_brewer(palette = "RdBu") +
  ylab("Number of Occurrences") +
  xlab("Lyrics") +
  ggtitle("Sentiment of Dixie Chicks Lyrics After 2003 Controversy")

summary(SentimentBefore) -> "SummaryBefore2003"
table(SummaryBefore2003)
## SummaryBefore2003
##  1st Qu.:  1.000    1st Qu.:-2.0000    3rd Qu.:  4.000    3rd Qu.: 2.0000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
## Class :character   Length:190          Max.   : 4.0000    Max.   :152.000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
##  Mean   :  4.126    Mean   :-0.2842    Median :  1.500    Median :-1.0000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
##  Min.   :  1.000    Min.   :-4.0000   Mode  :character   
##                  1                  1                  1
summary(SentimentAfter) -> "SummaryAfter2003"
table(SummaryAfter2003)
## SummaryAfter2003
##   1st Qu.: 1.000    1st Qu.:-2.0000    3rd Qu.: 2.0000     3rd Qu.: 4.000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
## Class :character   Length:142          Max.   : 4.0000     Max.   :46.000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
##   Mean   : 3.556    Mean   :-0.2958     Median : 2.000    Median :-1.0000   
##                  1                  1                  1                  1 
##   Min.   : 1.000    Min.   :-4.0000   Mode  :character   
##                  1                  1                  1

Sentiment Conclusion

Above are the results after using the AFINN lexicon to test the sentiment of the words included in each album. The mean sentiment score for words in the first six albums was -0.2842 versus the sentiment score for words in lyrics after 2003 which was -0.2958. This shows that the word sentiment of lyrics in albums was actually a little more negative in the second two albums versus the six that came before the controversy. This goes against what I had thought initially, but I can hypothesize various reasons for this outcome. Upon further research into the Dixie Chicks it seemed as though they were not actually sorry for making the statements they had made. It can be assumed they they might feel anger that they lost so many fans and gained so much hate for enacting their right to freedom of speech. While they were still able to bounce back after their hiatus, they still may hold feelings of anger or resentment that are reflected in their more current music.

Female Empowerment and Feminist Words Conclusion

The results of this test weren’t incredibly conclusive. This by no means means that The Chicks are or are not feminists. All that we can really conclude is that there is no noticeable difference in language speaking about women before and after the 2003 controversy. While there was no clear change in feminist spirited words, this led to the next possible change in lyrical direction that we will be exploring.

Political and Religious Words Used In Album Song Lyrics

Final Thoughts