“Funky fresh dressed to impress”: A corpus-linguistic view on gender roles in pop songs

Since the beginnings of modern popular music, listening to pop songs has been one of the major pastimes in Western countries, raising the question how popular music contributes to the shaping of beliefs and attitudes in general and gender roles and stereotypes in particular. While there is a considerable body of research concerning the depiction of men and women in pop music videos, the lyrics of pop songs, so far, have largely been neglected as a viable source of data. On the basis of two corpora of contemporary pop songs by male and female artists, respectively, the present paper explores discourses of femininity and masculinity as represented in the lyrics of pop songs. It is shown that although the two corpora behave surprisingly similarly in some respects, the way in which male and female artists refer to themselves or to the opposite sex might contribute to the consolidation of unfavourable roles for women.