Most overused animals of indie rock?
The Beat Crave published recently published their list of the top 5 most overused animals names of indie rock. They list the bird, wolf, bear, horse and deer as the top - citing bands like deerhoof, band of horses, panda bear, wolf parade and birds of tokyo. This post got me thinking of these were the top animals in general - or is this just indie rock. So I grabbed myself a copy of WordNet, along with JAWS (the Java API for Wordnet searching) and the 20K most popular artists names from Last.fm, and wrote a bit of code to find out.
Here are my results of the most popular animals of music:
The Dog - with 14 bands including Temple of the Dog, Three Dog Night, Dog eat Dog, The Black Dog.
The Wolf - with 11 bands such Wolf, Wolf Parade, and Sea Wolf .
The Tiger with 10 bands including Tiger, Tiger Army and Timid Tiger
The Bear with 10 bands like Minus the Bear, Grizzly Bear, and Panda Bear.
The Cat with 9 artists like The Cat Empire, Space Cat and Super Cat
So it looks like there's some overlap between Beat Crave's list of the top 5 most overused animal names of indie rock - we see 'wolf' and 'bear' on both our lists, but for our analysis, 'dog', 'tiger' and 'cat' are used quite a bit more often than 'deer', 'bird' and 'horse'.
Using WordNet is fun (and the JAWS library makes it incredibly easy to use). Here are some more artist name facts:
Most popular colors:
Black (94)
Blue (52)
Brown (40) - but these are mostly names
Red (36)
White (36)
Most popular moods/feelings:
Love (44)
Joy (10)
Hate (9)
Terror ( 8 )
Fear ( 8 )
Most popular fruit:
Lemon (10)
Cherry (7)
Strawberry (4)
Banana (3)
Lime (3)
Perhaps one of my favorite band memes is to add a 'head' suffix to a word such as for bands like Radiohead, Buckethead, Zebrahead, The Lemonheads, Mushroomhead, etc.