GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive65 charts

Songs as Data: The Song Chart Meme Archive

The founding format: take a lyric, treat it as a dataset, and render it in the dullest business chart available.

Sixty-five charts in this collection have the same construction. Somebody took a song they already knew by heart, decided its words were a dataset, and drew the result in a format designed for quarterly reporting. That is the whole trick, and it is the trick the site was named for.

The strongest examples are almost all from 2008, which is when the format still had rules. Number of Calls Per Year to 867-5309 takes a phone number from a chorus and plots it as call volume over time. Days I Need Your Love, Babe fills in a week. Things To Do At The YMCA reads the acronym as a facilities list. Air Speed Velocity of Various Objects According to Monty Python is not a song at all but obeys the same discipline: a fixed source, a mundane chart type, no invention.

Why the constraint made it better

A chart about nothing in particular can put anything on either axis, and it usually does. A chart about a song cannot. The lyric is public, the reader already has it memorised, and every category on the chart can be checked against the words. That is a real constraint, and it produced the most disciplined work in the archive.

You can watch it slacken. The 2008 entries here are transformations — Demographic Makeup of the Midnight Train to Anywhere is a census of a train that exists only in a chorus, Yellow Submarine Residential Population the same joke applied to a submarine. The 2010 entries at the end of the collection are mostly captions: a phrase, a reaction, a graph attached afterwards. Same site, four years apart, and the format has stopped doing any work.

The Beatles problem

More charts here are about the Beatles than about any other subject, and there is a structural reason. Their lyrics are unusually enumerable — And In The End plots an ending, Breakdown of Lyrics to “Hey Jude” counts the repetitions in a coda that is mostly repetition, What you need according to the Beatles reduces a catalogue to a single requirement. A chorus that lists things is already a bar chart waiting for axes.

The same property explains the other recurring subjects: songs that count, songs that name days, songs that give instructions, songs built on a refusal. Don’t is a chart of a single word. Easy Come, Easy Go plots a symmetry the title hands over for free.

Where the lyric is the punchline and the chart is the setup

A few in this collection invert the usual order. Instead of using a chart to explain a song, they use a song to explain a chart. The Hills Are Alive asks what “alive” would mean as a measurement. What Time Is It? answers a rhetorical question with a clock. Things She Could Have Blinded Me With turns one line into an exhaustive list of alternatives, which is what a pie chart is for.

Survey of those movin’ on up is the most technically honest chart in the collection: it names a population, states what is being surveyed, and reports a result. It is a real survey of an imaginary group, and the form is impeccable.

The unrecovered half

Thirty-two entries here have no image. That is a loss of just under half the collection, and the reason is dates rather than content: the song chart meme era ran earliest, its files sat on the oldest hosting arrangement, and the further back an image URL goes the less likely any copy of it is still reachable. The titles are kept because a title, a date and an address are what the record actually contains, and inventing a chart to fill the gap would be worse than leaving it visible.

Charts here
65
Images recovered
33
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
84
First posted
Mar 2008
Last posted
Oct 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems

    · 2 domains still link here

  2. A2

    How much I got on it

  3. A3

    Recommended Percentage of Wiggling it

    · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Decision vs. Amount of Ensuing Trouble

  5. A5

    Plays the Fool (Sometimes)

    · image not recovered

  6. A6

    Who Started This Fire??

    · image not recovered

  7. A7

    Amount I’ll Be Watching You At Various Times of Day

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  8. A8

    “Use the _____, Luke”

    · image not recovered

  9. A9

    GOO GOO GOO JOOB

    · 2 domains still link here

  10. A10

    Monthly Calendar for Robert Smith

    · 6 domains still link here · published as a plate

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    And In The End

    · 2 domains still link here

  13. B2

    Nah, Hey, Goodbye

    · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Survey of those movin’ on up

  15. B4

    I Want My…

    · Drawn by Strange/David MTV Chili’s · image not recovered

  16. B5

    pie chart representing colours i’m back in

    · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Situations in which I Cannot Live

  18. B7

    Easy Come, Easy Go

  19. B8

    Yellow Submarine Residential Population

    · image not recovered

  20. B9

    The Hills Are Alive

  21. B10

    Things We’re Gonna Need

    · Drawn by Traci K. Jaws

  22. Side C
  23. C1

    Effects Of Cecilia

    · image not recovered

  24. C2

    Jenny

    · image not recovered

  25. C3

    Break Me Off A Piece Of That

  26. C4

    Tootsie Pop

    · Drawn by Ori · image not recovered

  27. C5

    She Told Me To Walk

    · Drawn by Tom B · image not recovered

  28. C6

    Girls That Rick Springfield Wants

    · Drawn by Joe W

  29. C7

    Structure Of Ass

    · Drawn by James L · 3 domains still link here · image not recovered

  30. C8

    What Time Is It?

    · Drawn by zepplinmage · 2 domains still link here

  31. C9

    Miles Walked

    · Drawn by Matt D

  32. C10

    We Built This City

    · Drawn by Suppa B · 2 domains still link here

  33. Side D
  34. D1

    My Coconuts

    · Drawn by Kate Mackay · image not recovered

  35. D2

    Do You Know Where Your Lion Is?

    · Drawn by B. Brucker · image not recovered

  36. D3

    Hold Me Closer

    · Drawn by kate b

  37. D4

    People & Things That Have A Name

    · Drawn by Griffin · image not recovered

  38. D5

    Lola

    · Drawn by Richard I · image not recovered

  39. D6

    Things Required Where You Are Going

    · Drawn by Zach T

  40. D7

    Demographic Makeup of the Midnight Train to Anywhere

    · Drawn by Steve S · 2 domains still link here

  41. D8

    Advice Given By the Witch-Doctor

    · Drawn by Tom B

  42. D9

    Things To Do At The YMCA

    · Drawn by Tommy R

  43. D10

    Let’s Dance

    · Drawn by Reade

  44. Side E
  45. E1

    Cuz I’m

    · Drawn by Corey H · image not recovered

  46. E2

    Things She Could Have Blinded Me With

    · Drawn by Brendon D

  47. E3

    Wax

    · Drawn by Nate R · image not recovered

  48. E4

    Don’t

    · Drawn by Nathan · 2 domains still link here

  49. E5

    Bucket Repair Flowchart

    · Drawn by Kate Moore · image not recovered

  50. E6

    How to Cure a Fever

    · Drawn by B. Hammer

  51. E7

    These are few of my favorite things

    · Drawn by Pete N · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  52. E8

    Things That Come After 69

    · Drawn by Matthew H

  53. E9

    Number of Calls Per Year to 867-5309

    · Drawn by Rodney T

  54. E10

    Places I Want to Rock Down To

    · Drawn by Neil Johnston

  55. Side F
  56. F1

    Misheard Lyrics to Rock the Casbah

    · Drawn by Alice · image not recovered

  57. F2

    The Answer

    · Drawn by Robert · 2 domains still link here

  58. F3

    Don’t Cry

    · Drawn by Greg Wilson · image not recovered

  59. F4

    Easy come, easy go, will you let me go?

    · Drawn by mattykru · 2 domains still link here

  60. F5

    MATERIAL USED TO BUILD THIS CITY

    · Drawn by dasnail

  61. F6

    Not in the face

    · image not recovered

  62. F7

    On your period

    · image not recovered

  63. F8

    Quick use your totem

    · image not recovered

  64. F9

    Its hip to be quadrilaterals

    · image not recovered

  65. F10

    Time to Face This Placebo Head On

    · Drawn by funky3000 · image not recovered

  66. Side G
  67. G1

    Thumbs ftw

    · image not recovered

  68. G2

    Deal with it

    · image not recovered

  69. G3

    Afternoon delight

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  70. G4

    Like a Reverse Strawberry

  71. G5

    No Direction Home

Queries answered

What is a song chart meme?

A chart whose data is a song. The lyric supplies the numbers, the categories or the timeline, and a standard business format, pie, bar, line, calendar, supplies the deadpan. The phrase was the slug prefix on hundreds of posts here between March 2008 and 2009, and it is still the search people arrive with.

Why does the format work?

Because the source is fixed. The lyric cannot be changed, the chart type is mundane, and the only creative decision left is which format makes the familiar thing look absurd. That constraint is why the 2008 material in this collection is stronger than the free-form charts that came later.

Which songs turn up most often?

The Beatles, by a wide margin, then anything with a countable list in it: days of the week, place names, numbers, instructions. A chorus that enumerates something is halfway to being a chart already.

Are these charts accurate?

Where the lyric is the dataset, often yes. A calendar of the days named in a chorus can be checked against the words, and several in this collection are correct in that narrow sense. None of them measures anything about the world.

Why do some entries here have no image?

The original images were hosted on a service that now returns an error for all of them, so each onedid not survive on its original host. Where no copy survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address instead of a substitute.