Draft talk:List of songs whose title appears more than twenty times in the lyrics

This article was nominated for deletion on 15 October 2005. The result of the discussion was delete. An archived record of this discussion can be found here.

"Opera"

As for: "Opera": No Other word's apart from Opera were in the song.

Belongs therefore definitely into List of songs in which the title constitutes the entire lyrics.

But what's the count?

Hugh!, Frank W ~@) R 23:35 Mar 15, 2003 (UTC)

p.s. (i.e., especially if order will be by count, rather than alphabetically).

Issues with counting

I'm as huge a fan of these lists as anyone, but I have a problem with the counting issue, mostly because it's very vague. I was planning on listing the song "Yoohoo" by Imperial Teen, but the problem is that the background singers are almost constantly chanting - "ah, yoohoo, ah, yoohoo" for the entire chorus. Also, the lead singer will also sing "She said yoohoo" on top of the background singers. First of all, do background singers count? Secondly, is the overlaid "yoohoo" one repetition or two? -- A Very Confused DropDeadGorgias

As long as they can be distinguished at all, I'd rather have counts limited to the lead voice(s) and/or printed lyrics (at least: the numbers I had got for I'm gonna be and Peaches adhere to that). Or better yet: disambiguate by means of correspondingly distinct Wikipedia articles. Regards, Frank W ~@) R 08:30 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)

p.s. Based on memory, I'm rather sceptical about the supposed 20+ Roxannes (The Police). Hope to listen and to count by myself soon ... (Is up to the count. Frank W ~@) R 05:20 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC))

Listening to it, I counted 'Roxanne' 26 times (and a "Rox"...). It's another situation where the background singers account for most of them. Sting only sings the name a few times. --Mrwojo 13:30 Mar 29, 2003 (UTC)

cool. I've also removed "Fun Fun Fun" by the Beach Boys, because each "Fun" does not count as a repetition. As a series, there are only 14 repetitions, even counting the background singers. -- DropDeadGorgias

The Police

Removing De do do do De da da da (The Police); appears completely only a paltry dozen times. (*sigh!*; and there are't any more "Walking on the Moon"s in Walking on the Moon either ... &). Frank W ~@) R 05:20 Mar 19, 2003 (UTC)

Speaking of The Police, what about Message in a Bottle, Can't Stand Losing You, and Don't Stand So Close To Me? --Dante Alighieri 18:43 21 May 2003 (UTC)

"Message in a Bottle" = 10 times (if it were called "Sending out an S.O.S." then it'd make it heh). The other two songs have many "Du Hast"-like repeats. "Can't Stand Losing You" is sung 5 times, but "can't" and "can't stand losing" are said many more times than that. "Don't Stand So Close To Me" = 12 times (it always appears as "Don't stand / Don't stand so / Don't stand so close to me"). --Mrwojo 13:51 31 May 2003 (UTC)

"Hold Me Tight"

It's been ages since I had a look at this page. Now I realize "Hold Me Tight" is listed as a Beatles song. Well, it isn't. It's a song from one of McCartney's solo LPs. --KF 22:29, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

There is also a song called "Hold Me Tight" on /With The Beatles/. So much for artists knowing their back catalogs. -- anonymous, 29 Feb 2004

Weird Al Yankovic

I've just added 20 Weird Al Yankovic songs after listening to pretty much everything that might qualify (except some from "Poodle Hat"). Just to save any other Weird Al fan some trouble, I've verified that the following do NOT qualify:

"Achy Breaky Song": only 6! (It just seems like 20+.)
"Addicted To Spuds": 16
"Another One Rides the Bus": 16
"The Brady Bunch": 17
"Grapefruit Diet": 16
"Gump": 20
"Happy Birthday": 20
"I Love Rocky Road": 12
"I Think I'm A Clone Now": 13
"Isle Thing": 20 (even including 8 echoes)
"Lasagna": 12
"Livin' in the Fridge": 16
"Melanie": 18
"My Bologna": 9
"Ricky": 12
"Since You've Been Gone": 12
"Slime Creatures From Outer Space": 17
"Spam": 20
"Traffic Jam": 16
"Velvet Elvis": 18
"The White Stuff": 10

Also, "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long" is problematic, since:

"Six words long" is sung 24 times, but it's only the whole title if you don't count the parenthetical part.
If you do count it, it's zero, since the full phrase is never sung EXACTLY, but rather as "This song is just six words long" (14 times) -- a phrase which, by the way, Al, is SEVEN words long! :) (I don't think it qualifies for the List of songs whose title does not appear in the lyrics, since slight variations aren't counted.

Hmmm... I gotta get a life. -- Jeffq 05:33 Mar 08 2004 (UTC)

RE: "Six words long". First of all, your diligence is admirable... In the particular case of "Six Words Long", I think we should go with the precedent set at List of songs whose title does not appear in the lyrics, and not include parts of the title that are set in parentheses. - DropDeadGorgias (talk) 05:58, Mar 8, 2004 (UTC)

Good job doing work "ahead of time" with those songs, as there is now a List of songs whose title appears more than ten times in the lyrics, and I'll add the qualifying songs from your list above to that article. =) -- Saaga 17:44, Jul 26, 2004 (UTC)

Arbitrary boundaries

Although I made my contribution to it, I can't help but feel this list is arbitrary and maybe unencyclopedic. Why twenty times? Why not twenty-five? Fifteen? For that matter, why not make a list songs in the key of B flat major, and another corresponding list every other possible key, and yet another for songs that have no key at all because they don't use the chromatic scale? It seems to me the idea is more about making a list of songs with repetitive lyrics, but such a list is avoided because the repetitiveness of something is subjective, whereas with most of the songs here, we can listen to them and say "Aha! The title occurs more than twenty times!", thus in most cases, whether something belongs on the list or not is a clear yes or no. Nineteen times does not qualify, but just one more and it does. (Actually, it doesn't, because the title of the article says more than twenty times. But who's counting?)

The problem I have with this is that such an arbitrary boundary is inherently artificial. While it makes everything factual and easy to confirm, it also makes it awkward (and gives the article an almost absurdly long title ;)) and even inhibits clarity of purpose. Is the focus on repetition, or on the title? If it's the former, well, certainly often lyrics that are not the title appear often in songs, but this list excludes them. If it's the latter, why? Why does it matter that the title as opposed to something else is repeated a bunch of times?

Well, I think I've got my point across, so I'll shut up for now. ;)

--Furrykef 15:34, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm just letting you guys know that my opinions on this matter haven't changed in the past months except that I'm even more convinced that list like these don't really belong on Wikipedia at all. It's not encyclopedic material. We're compiling lists for the sake of doing so. The purpose of an encyclopedia is to communicate information, which I think lists like these do poorly. This is just trivia. You don't really learn anything from it. You probably couldn't even use the information in this list to your advantage on a quiz show. Possibly not even a musical quiz show. I'm not against lists of songs that actually have a reason for existing and might actually be useful, but I can't imagine why this list exists. - furrykef (Talk at me) 01:14, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I agree, I can't understand why this article exists. I, for one, have never needed to know such an odd piece of trivia. --132.170.40.117 05:54, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If you feel so strongly about it, you should probably nominate the article for deletion. Please see Wikipedia:Deletion policy. Cheers. --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 13:23, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

Alice in Chains: "Again"

Does "Alice in Chains" really have a song "Again"? If so, they could join Lenny Kravitz in the list of sets of unrelated songs with identical titles or whatever it's called. Wiwaxia 04:01, 5 May 2004 (UTC)[reply]

They do (did). It's on the 1995 self-titled album. -- 80.171.119.217 23:41, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Meatloaf : IWDEFL

"I would do everything for love, but I won't do that"? According to [1] IWDEFL occurs at least 30 times, even more with just "Anything for love", somewhat less with "IWDEFL, but I wont do that", so how about it? Surely deserves a mention for its repetitiveness, which I guess is what this list should be about, really.

Formatting

Does anyone else think the formatting of this article makes the entries unnecessarily and excessively spaced, and its layout could use some condensing? I don't want to change it if I'm alone on this, but it does seem like it could be condensed without losing any information whatsoever. -R. fiend 06:10, 19 Jan 2005 (UTC)

(Don't Fear) The Reaper

I question this song. I don't think this song should be on the list. First of all I have it on my IPOD, listened to it and counted how many times "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was said. I only counted nine times. Am I going crazy or am I right? By the way, on the article page it doesn't say how many times "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" was said in the song. --Rentastrawberry 23:35, Feb 18, 2005 (UTC)

There is also a longer edit of this song (5:09 compared to the 3:43 radio edit). IIRC there is a longer instrumental section, but perhaps the longer time accounts for the extra counts? I don't know. Kvaks 20:17, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The version that I have is 7:40 and is live. I would think that if there would be one version of the song that has the name more than 20 times, this would be it. I'm going to delete from page. If anyone has other proof then add it to this talk page and put it back on the article page. Rentastrawberry 01:06, Apr 1, 2005 (UTC)

"Wonderful"

I notice every time I come to this page, someone's added "Wonderful" by Everclear... but no one's bothered to put in a count for it. I've only heard this song a few times, and I'm not exactly in a place to count it myself (nor do I trust lyrics sites). Anyone want to have a go at it? Kyou

Synonyms

I think synonyms for words that are part of the title that are used on parts of the song instead should be counted (e.g. pony is synonymous with horse). I heard the song "White Horse" by Laid Back which is an old skool funk song, and they transistion from horse to pony lyrically at some point. Should synonyms apply as a count trip? The title would occur 22 times if you included White Pony which is synonymous to horse --SuperDude 20:58, 19 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, synonyms don't count. The criteria is too vague. --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 21:02, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

Extended versions

Do extended versions of songs count on this list if their titles exceed a count of 20 times in the lyrics while the original length versions were under 20 count of? this does not include the extention of the title in brackets. Here is what I mean, "Burn Rubber" counts 1, however, "Burn Rubber" counts 1 in "Burn Rubber (extended mix)" as well. --SuperDude 03:37, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Partial title

Would the name of the song with the brackets phrase excluded count as occurrences of title?

Questionable addition

This line has recently been added: "Double titles (like Louie Louie) count as 2 occurrences. And so on." Isn't that contrary to how these have been done? -R. fiend 29 June 2005 17:05 (UTC)

from Wikipedia:Deletion review (October 31, 2005)

List of songs whose title appears more than twenty times in the lyrics

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of songs whose title appears more than twenty times in the lyrics

Ditto. Ordinary deletionism is bad enough, but disappointing all those contributors who have made a total of 514 (!) edits to this article is more than I can stomach. You can't be serious. I just can't believe that List of songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks is allowed to survive while this article has to go. Who gives a damn about Clear Channel? What is Clear Channel? <K F> 01:43, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Endorse closer decision (Keep Deleted). the AFD is quite clear, the list is not useful, and the list itself violates WP:NOT. Listcruft. Tito xd^(?!?) 01:56, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse (keep deleted). Rossami (talk) 01:59, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse closure (keep deleted). Disappointment is not on the list of reasons for not deleting an article! I could spend hours writing a wonderful article about my wonderfully non-notable company and would have to live with it being deleted. If you don't like the other article then, instead of choosing the "drive Wikipedia to the standard of the worst article", nominate it for deletion. Article's stand or fall usually on their own merits, not on the (dis-)merits of other articles. There's no reason to suppose the nominator here could have swung the pretty-near unanimous deletion debate, and certainly no new information is presented, apart from wishing, and I don't think the encyclopedia is better with it restored. -Splash^talk 02:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse closer (keep deleted). No defect of process or new information given. I voted against this at AfD as well, and still find it to be listcruft, and distressingly random in its criterion of interest. Xoloz 16:21, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse decision Valid AfD, with clear consensus. Quite in accord with WP:NOT and other relevant policy. No new issues presented here, and no process violations. Keep this deleted, and please do not try to recreate this. DES ^(talk) 16:55, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
relist. --Briangotts (talk) 18:58, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Add reasoning to taste. -Splash^talk 19:00, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse closer (keep deleted). No problem with the AfD is mentioned. Amusing list, but the "rough consensus" was crystal clear, and no fresh information has been presented that would suggest that a new AfD would have a different result. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:29, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Endorse. encephalon 21:23, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted. Valid VfD. As for who Clear Channel is, they're the company that runs most of the radio stations in the United States. They've got a great deal of influence about what does or does not get airtime. --Carnildo 23:20, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Keep delete - hell no --Doc (?) 23:22, 31 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted. Hell, some of those 514 edits are mine, and I can't say I'm terribly disappointed with the results (if it weren't for the article, I probably never would have counted the number of times Edward Tudor-Pole says "Who Killed Bambi", but that's hardly important). It was a vaguely interesting list to some, but not exactly encyclopedic. If anyone wants it temporarily undeleted for use outside of Wikipedia, I'd be open to that, however. -R. fiend 16:30, 1 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
Keep deleted. Valid Afd. *drew 03:12, 3 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]