Above is a word cloud that shows a 5-year rolling average of the top words of Billboard Top-100 songs for a given year (exluding what NLTK defines as "stop words"). The most common word in top songs was “love” until 1998, where it switched to “na” before being dominated by “like” and “yeah”, a trend that continues into 2024.

An interesting development within this data is the short period of time where “na” was the top word. While it has almost always been included in the top 100 songs, dating back to 1963, its dominance in the late 1990s can be traced back to a singular song, “Here Comes the Hotstepper”, which features the word “na” 79 times, predominantly featured in its well-known chorus.

Released in 1994, this song would chart twice on the year-end Billboard Top 100, once in 1994 and once in 1995. The song’s use of “na” at such a high frequency coupled with its above-average longevity on the Top 100 made it have a substantial impact on our data, so much so that it changed the most used word for 4 consecutive years (since rolling averages were used). More than just a cool data-driven story, “Here Comes the Hotstepper” shows just how much one song can influence culture, as even after the song dropped out of the charts, its success likely contributed to other artists mimicking the song’s style, which is evident in the continued frequency of the word into the early 2000s.