ModeJuly2016 Item 2

Depeche Mode Lexicography

All the words inside these big letters come from Depeche Mode lyrics and the picture itself is the lateral result of a semi-scholarly fannish endeavour.

Back in mid-to-late 2000s I was a voracious reader of Sacreddm, the amazing, now sadly defunct website that archived, categorised and brilliantly annotated lots of DM articles, reviews and interviews. 

In footnotes to one of the articles, the website's author  listed all the cases of the word “knees” in the group’s lyrics and suggested that word make a “hefty” entry in the hypothetical “Martin Gore Dictionary”. 

I sometimes used to do things like that for fun – I’d take an album’s lyrics sheet and pick out significant words. I liked the idea of a DM dictionary, and set about compiling it. 

I had only a very vague idea of automatic lexical frequency analysis tools back then, so I worked the cumbersome way – writing doing all the nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs from the lyrics to all the Mode albums (1981-2009) on paper.

 

Then I decided to make my life easier with technology. To give it a try, I typed all the adjectives into a single Word file, and then, using the search function in another file containing all the Depeche Mode lyrics, counted how many times every word appeared in them. As a result, I had this:

 Of course, I counted the frequency almost “manually”, so chances are there may be mistakes (say, not 7 instances of “sweet” but 6 or 8), but the general ratio still holds true. 

Unfortunately, electronic copies of the materials from that fannish lexicography experiment were lost after a computer breakdown, and after that I got rid of the hand-written notes as well, obviously thinking seeing this project through would be too time-consuming.    

    
I made the DM lyrics Word file into a hand-made songbook and still keep and sometimes use it, though. 

Speaking of the findings of this experiment, they were amusing, if obvious (I'd bet every Mode fan can name a dozen of the most frequent words the band uses in their songs without quantitative analysis).