About half of every line Beyonce has written contains “I,” “me,” or “my.” Another third addresses “you” or “your.” Together, first and second person pronouns cover 87 percent of her catalog.
The TidyTuesday Beyonce Lyrics dataset has 22,616 lines across 391 songs. After filtering out remixes, live recordings, and alternate cuts, 11,654 lines across 224 original songs remain. What follows is a word-by-word count of those lines: who she’s talking to, what tense she writes in, how much she repeats herself, and where love and power actually land relative to each other.
First and second person pronouns make up 87% of lines
5,918 lines (51%) contain “I,” “me,” or “my.” Another 4,209 (36%) contain “you” or “your.” Third person barely registers: “we” appears in 622 lines (5%), “he/him” in 356 (3%), “they/them” in 338 (3%), “she/her” in 270 (2%).
For comparison, pop empowerment anthems tend to lean on “we” (Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” “We Are the Champions”). Beyonce frames even collective statements through “I” and “you.” “Formation” and “Freedom” are both first-person declarations delivered to a second person. “We” stays at 5% whether the song is a love ballad or a political statement.
Present-tense words outnumber past tense more than 4 to 1
Lines containing “now,” “tonight,” or “right now” appear 413 times. Future references (“forever,” “always,” “tomorrow,” “someday”) show up 155 times. Past tense (“yesterday,” “remember,” “used to,” “once”) appears just 93 times.
“Tonight” alone accounts for 111 of those present-tense appearances, making it one of her most-used scene-setting words. Research published in the APA’s Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts found that present-tense urgency is one of the traits that makes songs stick in your head. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports analyzing 353,320 songs confirmed that pop lyrics have shifted toward more present-focused language over the last five decades, and that the shift tracks with commercial success.
“Never” (223 appearances) is technically future-oriented, but it functions as a present-tense commitment: “I will never leave” is a vow being made right now.
The average song repeats 27.8% of its lines
One in roughly every four lines you hear in a Beyonce song is something you’ve already heard in that same song. The range runs from 0% (spoken pieces like “Yours and Mine” and “Trust In Me” have all unique lines) to 75% (“Hey Goldmember” repeats 39 of its 52 lines).
The Pudding’s 2017 analysis of lyric repetition found that the average pop song in 2014 was 22 percent more compressible than the average song from 1960. Beyonce’s 27.8% average sits above that baseline. Research from the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that repetitive lyrics increase “processing fluency” (how easily your brain handles the information), and that higher fluency predicts commercial success.
The word “halo” alone makes up 15.9% of all words in “Halo.” The phrase “Who run the world? Girls!” accounts for 24.6% of its song.
The most repeated individual lines show which phrases do the heavy lifting across her catalog.
“That’s how you like it, huh” appears 48 times in a single song. “Who run the world? Girls!” comes in at 23. After that, the list shifts to relationship lines: “If I let you go” (20), “Know that I can’t get over you” (16), “I’ll be waiting” (16). Her most repeated material skews toward intimacy and longing, not anthems.
“Love” appears in 721 lines, “hate” in 23
The word “love” shows up in 721 lines across 224 songs. “Hate” appears in 23. That’s roughly 31 to 1. How she uses “love” grammatically breaks down like this:
Active constructions (“I love,” “love you,” “my love”) total 323. Passive constructions (“your love,” “love me”) total 117. She declares love about 2.8 times as often as she requests it.
Her most common negation patterns run the same way: “I don’t wanna” (35 times), “I ain’t sorry” (26), “I don’t care” (13), “I won’t let you go” (8). More refusals than regrets.
Vulnerability drops 30% from opening to closing
Across 187 songs with at least 20 lines, there’s a measurable shift when you compare the first quarter of each song to the last quarter. Vulnerability language (“cry,” “broken,” “hurt,” “alone,” “lost”) drops 30%. Empowerment language (“run,” “power,” “strong,” “rise,” “free”) rises 29%. Romance language rises 20%.
This pattern holds across albums and collaborators. The Lemonade visual album made it explicit with its chapter progression (“Intuition,” “Denial,” “Anger” through “Forgiveness,” “Resurrection,” “Hope,” “Redemption”), but the same arc was already present at the individual song level before that album. Warsan Shire wrote the spoken-word interludes for Lemonade, but the data suggests the vulnerability-to-strength movement was already built into the songwriting.
Desire and longing appear in 60% of songs, confidence in 16%
Keyword clusters across all 224 songs show which themes dominate. Desire and longing (“want,” “need,” “miss,” “waiting”) appear in 60% of songs. Sensuality and body (“touch,” “kiss,” “feel,” “body”) in 56%. Confidence and power (“boss,” “queen,” “slay,” “flawless,” “power”), the thing most associated with the Beyonce brand, show up in 16%.
A small number of songs carry the empowerment association: “Run the World (Girls),” “***Flawless,” “Formation,” “Freedom.” The Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sample on “***Flawless” (“We teach girls to shrink themselves…”) appears in exactly one song. “Formation” became what Time magazine called the song with “the greatest influence of all songs” on the 2016 presidential election. These tracks punch well above their weight in public perception, but they represent a fraction of the catalog. Most of her output is love songs and body songs.
The ratios between individual word pairs show where the balance tips and where it stays close.
“Beautiful” vs. “ugly” is the most extreme: 43 to 0. “Ugly” never appears in her original catalog. But “stay” vs. “leave” is nearly even at 52 to 49, and “heaven” vs. “hell” is 29 to 17. The abstract, aspirational words (love, beauty, strength) run lopsided. The words tied to actual relationship decisions (stay/leave, trust/doubt) stay closer to parity.
One ratio worth noting: “king” appears in 306 lines, “queen” in 7. The woman the public calls Queen Bey almost never uses the word in her own lyrics. Even royalty in her catalog is framed through the other person.
“Never” appears 223 times, “forever” 51. She makes more vows about what she won’t do than what she will.
The full catalog contains 80,142 words, roughly the length of a novel, with 5,340 unique words. By the Pudding.cool methodology (standardizing to the first 35,000 words for cross-artist comparison), Beyonce uses 2,911 unique words. Eminem uses 4,494. Aesop Rock uses 7,392. Vocabulary range varies by genre, but the gap is real: Beyonce works with a smaller set of words and repeats them more.
Dataset used:
tidytuesday/beyonce-lyrics– The raw dataset contains 22,616 lyric lines across 391 songs. After filtering out remixes, live recordings, alternate versions, medleys, and Homecoming performances, the analysis uses 11,654 lines across 224 original songs. Filtering excluded songs whose names contain “Remix,” “Mix,” “Version,” “Live,” “Edit,” “Dub,” “Homecoming,” or “Medley” (case-insensitive).
Calculations & transformations:
- Pronoun analysis: Each line was checked for membership in pronoun groups (I/me/my/mine/myself, you/your/yours/yourself, etc.) using exact word matching with word boundary detection. Lines containing multiple pronoun groups are counted in each group.
- Temporal orientation: Lines were classified as present-oriented (containing “now,” “tonight,” “right now”), future/eternal (“forever,” “always,” “tomorrow,” “someday”), or past (“yesterday,” “remember,” “used to,” “once”) based on keyword presence.
- Repetition metrics: For each song, repetition percentage was calculated as
1 - (unique lines / total lines), where lines were lowercased and trimmed before comparison. - Emotional landscape: Songs were flagged for emotional themes using keyword clusters (e.g., desire/longing: “want,” “need,” “crave,” “miss,” “waiting”; confidence/power: “boss,” “queen,” “slay,” “flawless,” “power”). Each theme used 7-13 keywords. A song is counted once per theme regardless of how many matching lines it contains.
- Emotional arc: For songs with 20+ lines, the first 25% and last 25% of lines were separately classified using four keyword clusters (vulnerable, empowered, romantic, defiant). Totals were summed across all qualifying songs.
- Love construction analysis: Regex patterns matched specific grammatical constructions (“I love,” “love me,” “your love,” “in love,” “don’t love,” etc.) within each line.
- Vocabulary size: All words were extracted using
[a-z']+regex, lowercased, with tokens under 2 characters excluded. The 5,340 unique word count covers the full 80,142-word corpus. The 2,911 figure at 35,000 words matches the Pudding.cool methodology for cross-artist comparison.
Limitations:
- Remixes, live recordings, alternate versions, medleys, and Homecoming performances were filtered out by song name pattern matching. This filter is imperfect: some excluded songs may contain unique lyrics (e.g., remix verses by featured artists), and some included songs may be near-duplicates not caught by the filter.
- Keyword-based emotional classification is a blunt instrument. “Run” in “Run the World” carries different emotional weight than “run” in “run away.” Context-free word matching will misclassify some lines.
- The dataset has no album or release date metadata, so temporal analysis of how Beyonce’s writing has evolved over her career is not possible from this source alone.
- Songwriter credits and album timeline context referenced in the narrative come from Wikipedia, Billboard, The Wrap, and Pudding.cool, not from the TidyTuesday dataset.
Data accessed on 2026-04-04 via the OpenData API.
