There’s a standard way of visualizing a hit song. It’s call a music video. But if you’re Nathan Yau, there’s another way, yet. Over at Flowing Data, Yau has created one of his hilarious infographic posters, this time using the most popular songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 as fodder. Yau took chart-topping hits, starting in 1958, and rendered them into illustrations that cleverly sum up what’s happening in each song.
The thing about pop music is that its favored subject matter has remained fairly stable, even over decades. “My first thought was that I was gonna end up figuring out 100 ways to show love,” he says. “And yeah, a lot of popular songs are about love, but once I got going, I realized there are other important things, like partying tonight and tomorrow and wondering what the next party will be like.”
In all seriousness though, love is a recurring them, and Yau came up with plenty of ways to visualize its various forms. Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” gets the Venn diagram treatment, while Leann Rimes’ “How Do I Live” is visualized in bar chart form. The sheer hyperbole of some songs, like Bryan Adams’ 1991 hit “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You” are best depicted as a pie chart while Blondie’s “Call Me” is perfectly encapsulated with one graphic.
Yau has a knack for pulling out the most illustratable moments in media (see his movie quotes poster), which can be partially attributed to his research process. The statistician says the project was a nice nostalgia trip; he listened to songs and rewatched video to see which lyrics held the most heft. Along the way, he even found a few gems unrelated to infographics. “One of my favorites is #70, 'Rush, Rush,'” he says. “Keanu Reeves is Paula Abdul’s point of interest in the music video, which seemed like some high level foreshadowing for his starring role in the movie Speed.”
You can pre-order the 24x36-inch chart here.
