An Analysis Of Rod's Song Naming Proclivities, or, I Can't Believe I Wrote This Post

On our parent site, supermegamonkey, I called Rod out* on his song naming tendencies. Specifically, his use of food and animal names for titles. Rod then called me out, (focusing, on the food side) with the following statistics, "2 songs out of 28 Politburo songs and jams. Or 5 songs out of 78 songs on this site**." According to Rod's own numbers (which we will address in a second), 7.14% of Politburo songs, and 6.41% total songs are named for food.

Now, I disagree with Rod's given numbers. Looking on this Politburo page we get 2 food named songs, and 21 songs total. Here we get 1 food named song (chicken wire) and 34 songs total. Here we get 3 food named songs and 20 songs total. That gives us 6 food named songs on the site and 75 songs total. (We've decided that the animal named songs was a false association and, really shouldn't count. Unless it's common to eat the animal, that's why 'chicken' counts). That's 8% on the total site.

As for the Politburo songs specifically***, 9 are jams given merely descriptions rather than actual names. Of the remaining twelve songs, 2 are covers, 1 is an arrangement of a traditional song, and at least 2 were not named by Rod. That leaves 2 food named songs out of 7 total. That's a whopping 28.57% of songs.

Plus, Rod's solo stuff reveals his truest naming habits, as he, theoretically had no one else influencing him on the naming of these songs. So, what do we find here? A very large 15% of song titles!

But, let's focus on the grand total including all the songs, 6 of 75 yielding 8%. If only there were another musician out there famed for having food related songs. Oh wait! How about "Weird Al" Yankovic? He is so associated with food songs, he put out an album of just food songs. In a quick survey, I found 17 songs total dealing with food (including 12 with food in the title, 2 of which had nothing to actually do with food & 5 without food in the title, but are about food in some way) and 140 songs total. That's 12.14% of his songs and 8.57% if we eliminate those 5 without food actually in the title. So a comedian renowned for having songs about food had only a little over a half a percentage point more food titled songs than Rod! And it doesn't even come close to the 15% that Rod names on his solo work!

Now let's compare them both to some random, non-satirical musician. Let's say Dio****. Of Dio's 102 songs, 1 has a food in the title (.98%) and three additional have food related activities in the titles***** ("Hungry" "Eat" & "Feed") (3.91%). Here at SUPERMEGADIO!!!!!, we, logically use Dio as the standard. With that in mind, the numbers clearly show that Rod can be fairly described as having an inclination to name songs after foods.

However, the real reason this perception is in our heads is less technical. In high school, Rod had two songs: Why? and Sour Yogurt. See, half his song titles were seen to have food in the titles. Then, when we were presented with the song titles Smallest Plum, Potato With Wings, and Platypus close together temporally, we further connected them in our mind to Rod's love of song titles with food in them.****** But, it's nice to see the numbers support our beliefs.

*I don't remember what I was gonna footnote here.
**He means his site, supermegamonkey.
***At least the song's presented on this website.
****Surprised? And we mean the band Dio here, not every song Dio recorded with anyone.
*****Presented here for completeness sakes, but should not really factor in.
******This is where the false animal titled songs factors in.