Materialism Construction: Keyword Analysis of Bruno Mars’ Song Lyrics Arisara Thongnopphakhun Wannapa Trakulkasemsuk Thanis Bunsom King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi, Bangkok, Thailand Corresponding author’s email:
[email protected] Received 21 January 2019; revised 26 June 2019; accepted 31 July 2019; online 30 August 2019 Abstract Music has long been an effective way to communicate to the masses, and lyrics play an essential role in delivering this communication. Lyrics may contain an ideology and influence listeners. This study aims to conduct a keyword analysis to investigate the materialistic ideology connoted in Bruno Mars’ song lyrics. The corpus of Bruno Mars’ lyrics was compiled from lyrics of 30 Bruno Mars songs in three albums released between 2010 and 2016. The corpus was then compared against the British National Corpus (BNC) to obtain a keyword list. The top 100 keywords were selected based on their statistical values for further analysis. They were classified according to their part of speech, and concordance lines of each keyword were obtained so as to discuss the representation of Bruno Mars’ songs. Materialistic concepts found in the corpus include an emphasis on, or preference for, 49 Vol. 14 No. 2 (2019) luxury objects, brand-name items, a lavish lifestyle, parties, economic power, physical appearance, and objectifying women. Keywords: Aboutness, Bruno Mars lyrics, Keyword analysis, Materialism Introduction In this age of great technological advancement, popular culture (or pop culture) is widespread. As citizens of the globalised world, it is difficult for us to escape from the influence of mass media and popular culture (Monk, Winslade & Sinclair, 2008).