Numlock Sunday: What song does everybody know?

Introducing your future national anthem.

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, something fun!

One of my favorite parts of going on vacation is getting a chance to get away from it all, to kick back, relax, have a couple drinks, have a couple more drinks, really get pretty lit all things considered and then get into an inebriated discussion about what songs you think everybody really knows. I’d insist that if it came down to it, yes, as a matter of fact, I can probably sing “Welcome to the Black Parade” front to back, thank you very much, and then immediately fail to do it. Spurious, unverifiable claims such as “I bet more millennials know the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ than to the national anthem” get said, and cannot be unsaid. That’s what vacation is all about.

But one advantage of covering numbers, stats and culture all these years is that if one of those drunken arguments lingers in my brain, I can actually get to the bottom of it upon returning to my actual job. To do so, I reached out to the good people at YouGov — who we last featured in a Sunday edition last year and who I’ve been very eager to work with again — to get to the bottom of it.

Across two surveys, we asked respondents, “Which, if any, of the following songs do you think you know all or nearly all of the lyrics to? Select all that apply,” and presented a list of several songs.

You can check out the full data over at YouGov here, but I wanted to dive into some fun parts of the results here.

(If a table or chart hasn’t loaded fully in your inbox, or you want to mess around with the interactivity of it, just click through to the post online — it’ll work there.)

First up, the songs that pretty much everyone knows:

You will observe that we captured a lot of different options here — from religious staples (“Amazing Grace”) to pop hits (“Let it Be” and “Don’t Stop Believin’”) to patriotic songs (“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful”) to popular television theme songs (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Pokémon, and Spongebob Squarepants). We also covered a few songs that just feel sort of unavoidable in American life (“Baby Shark” or “Waiting All Day for Sunday Night”).

In general, the patriotic and religious classics seem to come out well ahead of any other. Oldies and classic rock anthems tend to make up the known songs of the more popular genre. Frankly, I must concede that Millennials have failed to adequately secure sufficient cultural hegemony to propel their generation’s pop to the center of the national consciousness.

That said, it is worth diving a bit deeper into the somewhat exciting crosstabs.

First up, gender. In general, women claimed to know the lyrics to songs in this set considerably more than men did, and on average claimed to know them by 6.6 points more on any given song than their male counterparts. However, there were a few specific songs that were vastly more well-known by one gender or another.

Men can’t be relied upon to be able to belt “Amazing Grace,” “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” “Let it Go,” “Jolene” or “How Far I’ll Go” with anywhere near the numbers that women could. On the other hand, men claim to be remarkably good at singing “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Piano Man” and “Take on Me” — a feat that any cursory appearance at a karaoke bar will indeed confirm.

But now, the main event. Let’s talk generational songs.

Obviously, the key differentiator for music taste is “did this song come out within 10 years of your 17th birthday,” a phenomenon that has been consistently explored. Needless to say, whether or not a roomful of people will know a song is highly dependent on who is in that room, and honestly, where that room is; a 50th birthday party on Long Island is way more likely to know “Piano Man” than “Welcome to the Black Parade,” is what I’m saying.

I pulled five songs for each age bucket in the data set — 18 to 29, 30 to 44, 45 to 64 and 65+ — that distinctly skewed towards one age bracket compared to the overall set.

As a denizen of the orange, 30 to 44 bucket, these results do check out. Please sound off in the comments if any of this resonates with you.

All that being said, perhaps yelling “I bet more millennials know the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ than to the national anthem” into the Adriatic Sea was a bit overdoing it. I’ll be the first to concede that. But, to my intense amusement, there were a few songs that consistently outperformed the United States National Anthem, when you crack it by age:

• “Jingle Bells,” “Happy Birthday” and “Amazing Grace” all beat the national anthem in at least one age demo.

• More people aged 18 to 29 knew the lyrics to “The SpongeBob SquarePants Theme Song” than the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and among the 30 to 44s, nautical nonsense came within a point of stripes and bright stars.

• Oh, also, more 18-29s knew “Let it Go,” from the film Frozen, than they do the National Anthem.

• “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey basically tied it among the 18-29s.

• “Hotel California” was within a couple of points from the “Star-Spangled Banner” among the 30-44s and 45-64s.

And, if you want to check out all the songs with their age splits in a sortable table, feel free to play around here:

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Edited by Crystal Wang

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.