Have you ever wondered about the physiology of music? Not the actual physiological make-up of music, but the body parts most often sung about? Well, the good folks at fleshmap.com have done all the heavy lifting for you, compiling data gleaned from over 10,000 songs (genre-independent) to create a pictographic body rebus. The diagram illustrates a genre by genre breakdown of body parts mentioned in song lyrics and their frequency. It’s pretty interesting. For instance, 77% of all songs feature the eyes as the most dominant lyrical body part. 22% feature the hands (blues and gospel). 11% (the percentage of hip-hop songs studied) featured the butt most prominently-in fact, within genre, the butt takes up the largest piece of the pie, with 20% of hip-hop body references relating to the booty (they like big butts and they cannot lie.) That said, hip-hop also offers the most physiological variety in terms of lyrical topics, with nearly twice the number of discrete body parts mentioned than any other genre.

I was a bit surprised that the eyes won out within the metal genre; I thought for sure the pictogram at the top of that list would feature a dragon, or maybe Satan. But I bet if the researchers went back and listened for context, the eyes in question would belong to dragons and/or demons. Glenn Danzig would happily grudgingly lend his personal library for cross-referencing this, I’m sure of it.

So this got me to thinking: what body part(s) do my commenters’ favorite artists/songs favor? Please respond below with artist, title, and excerpted lyric quoted.