This bar chart shows the average word complexity of the top 100 billboard songs over the years from 1960 to 2019 by genre. The average word complexity was calculated through a combined score based on analysis of the lyrics. More specifically it is a combination of the diversity of words, the average word length, and the readability (calculated using the Flesch score through the textstat library).

All of the genres seem to have a roughly equal average word complexity between 2.7 to 3.0, with rock having the highest complexity and pop, rap, and latin sharing the lowest complexity. The genres may share a similar complexity for several reasons including that the top 100 billboard songs may not necessarily be representative of the entire genre and that there may be a shared lyric structure for popular songs that many songwriters follow. Additionally, the Flesch score is generally used for English texts, and therefore may not be able to fully analyze the nuances between genres.