Song Lyric Flowcharts

About

Song Lyric Flowcharts are a series of graphic charts and diagrams that visualize the lyrics of popular songs in a sequential order, in similar vein to the use of LOLgraphs.

Origin

On August 17th, 2009, Tumblr^[6] user Jeannr posted a flowchart outlining the lyrics for the 1983 soft rock song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler (shown below). In the first five years, the post gathered upwards of 2,700 notes.

Precursor

One of the earliest known online projects devoted to flowchart visualization of popular song lyrics was launched as a single webpage under the domain Jamphat.com in November 2007. The site featured a series of Microsoft Office charts breaking down the semantics of hip hop & rap song lyrics.

Spread

On August 18th, 2009, BuzzFeed^[2] reposted Jeannr’s flowchart. On December 11th, the “Total Eclipse of the Heart” flowchart was highlighted by the Internet news blog Urlesque^[1] in an article about notable Internet flowcharts. The same day, Tumblr user loveallthis^[3] posted a flowchart for the 1968 rock song “Hey Jude” by The Beatles, which credited Jeannr’s original chart an inspiration (shown below). In five years, the post gained over 16,800 notes. On July 13th, 2010, a flowchart for the 1980 new wave song "Whip It’ by Devo was submitted to the /r/pics^[4] subreddit (shown below, right).

On October 20th, YouTuber lyricalflowcharts uploaded a video showing the creation of another flowchart for The Beatles’ song “Hey Jude” (shown below). In the next four years, the video garnered more than 180,000 views and 150 comments.

On January 24th, 2011, the webcomic Xkcd^[5] posted a flowchart illustrating the lyrics for several songs with repetitions of the word “na” (shown below).

On January 31st, 2014, the Redbull^[7] music blog highlighted a flowchart illustrating the lyrics for the 1971 rock song “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin (shown below). In the following three months, the post gathered more than 2,000 Facebook likes and 280 tweets.