Harry Styles Is Officially the PG King
Music

Harry Styles Is Officially the PG King

by Dante Silva

"Profanity royalty" isn't exactly a common phrase — in fact it's more the opposite — yet a new report set out to discover just who sat atop the throne.

AT&T's "All Home Connections" analyzed lyrics from artists with songs in Spotify's Top 200 in 2020 to determine which had the highest percentage of curse words. The compiled data looked at 1,091,844 words (read: a lot), before proceeding to rank artists accordingly.

It's not exactly a surprise that Harry Styles came out on top as the "cleanest" — he first entered our screens as a wide-eyed teenager, and has apparently preserved some of that One Direction innocence. According to the report, he "did not utter a curse word once across his lyrics."

His fans were quick to comment, hoping for more explicit lyrics on his next album:

Of course, it's worth noting that "clean" is a subjective term; "Watermelon Sugar" is commonly considered to be about oral sex, and much of his work centers on adult themes. Indeed, the other artists joining Styles' "clean list" aren't exactly PG, either — Ariana Grande's Positions album has been reviewed as "theatrically horny," Dua Lipa writes of getting "physical" and we won't even mention Justin Bieber's "Yummy."

On the more explicit side (the true "profanity royalty"), DaBaby had 2,912 swears in his lyrics, closely followed by Megan Thee Stallion (2,377) and the late Juice WRLD (1,761). The artists were deemed to espouse "language you may not share with your grandparents," which is only somewhat true — "WAP" is a certified family favorite.

Imposing any sort of moral judgement on profanity is borderline absurd — art is more nuanced than any "clean" and "dirty" distinctions make it out to be. We'll be streaming "Treat People With Kindness" and "Thot Shit" back to back.

Photo via Getty/ Kevin Mazur