This Canadian Radio-Rock Band Wrote The Dumbest Song Of The Decade, According To Science

“The Good Life” by Three Days Grace could have been written by a 4-year-old.

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“The Good Life” could have been written by a 4-year-old.

Three Days Grace is the remarkable nu-nu-metal mindshare that brought you modern goatee-rock masterpieces like “I Hate Everything About You,” “Animal I Have Become,” and “Just Like You.” They have two platinum records, and a hefty handful of #1 certifications on Billboard’s rock charts.

These angsty, mohawk-sporting scholars have a new accolade to put on the fridge: they’ve written the dumbest song of the decade, according to science.

The Norwood, Ontario band’s song “The Good Life” was singled out as being “the dumbest song of the last 10 years,” according to a lyrical analysis conducted by Andrew Powell-Morse, a specialist in sports data visualization. Powell-Morse sought to determine the readability score of over 200 popular songs, looking at word count, characters per word, and syllables per word, then assigned an average grade level to each song. “The Good Life” received a ranking of 0.8, meaning its lyrics are written at the reading level of a child who has not yet started grade one. Let’s have a look at what is supposedly dumber than “Turn Down For What”:

“All I want is a little of the good life/All I need is to have a good time/Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh/The good life.”

Okay, so it’s not exactly Dickensian, but is it really the dumbest song of the decade?

The analysis highlights many other revelations on the last decade of pop music, suggesting that country music is the most intelligent genre, Mariah Carey is the smartest pop diva, and Eminem is the most verbose rapper. The song that has been deemed as the smartest may surprise you—Blake Shelton’s “All About Tonight” received the highest readability score, with a grade level of 5.8. This ranking reveals a key flaw in Powell-Morse’s method, as there’s a grammatical error in the first sentence of Shelton’s song: “Don't bother telling me what I got coming in the morning/I already know.”

Powell-Morse is the first to acknowledge the shortcomings of his analysis, noting that it doesn’t account for “the meaning of a song, the metaphors, [or] how the words connect with the artist’s personal story...to create deeper meaning.”

Regardless of how dumb we think “The Good Life” is, it still went #1 on Billboard’s Rock Songs chart—​and made a dumb amount of money for Three Days Grace.

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