A close reading
Beauty and a Beat
by Justin BieberBelieve Acoustic (2012)
189 words · 69 distinct · 28 lines · 2:25
The lead
0:16
before the first word
The text
28 lines
Show you off, yeah
Tonight I wanna show you off, oh, oh
What you got, yeah
A billion could've never bought, oh, oh, oh
We gonna party like it's 3012 tonight
I wanna show you all the finer things in life
Read from the stored text. Another transcription would change the count a little; the shape would hold.
I. The lines
Nothing comes back a third time.
lines, start to finish
36% of the lines repeat one already sung, but no line is sung more than twice.
The title is sung 2 times.
II. The clock
2:25 of song, 189 words.
- Words a minute
- 78
- First word
- 0:16
- Longest silence
- 21 s
- from 1:09
- Busiest 15 seconds
- 37
- words
III. The vocabulary
Most-used words
20 words- 01all6
- 02tonight5
- 03show4
- 04wanna4
- 05like4
- 06it's4
- 07life4
- 08i'm4
- 09coming4
- 10ya4
- 11woah4
- 12off2
- 13gonna2
- 14party2
- 15finer2
- 16things2
- 17just2
- 18forget2
- 19about2
- 20world2
Stopwords set aside. The bar beneath each word is its share of the most-used.
Variety
69 distinct words in 189
Used only once15 words
Longest wordcould've
Average word3.62 letters
IV. In the catalogue
The 15th shortest of 227 songs Justin Bieber has recorded.
Every mark is one of Justin Bieber’s 227 songs, placed by its figure. The rule is the catalogue’s median; the oxblood mark is this song.
Read the whole catalogue →Words · 18915th shortest of 227