The Best Way to Get Mentioned in a Song

Or, which celebrities are musicians name-checking the most

Welcome to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place to talk music and data. Today’s newsletter starts with a fun fact about a very famous song and closes with me thinking about dedicating myself to a life of crime. I promise it makes sense.

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025.

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The Best Way to Get Mentioned in a Song

By Chris Dalla Riva

Earlier this week, it was brought to my attention that with the death of Brigitte Bardot, the only living people directly mentioned in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are Bob Dylan, Chubby Checker, and Bernie Goetz. This inspired me to once again discuss how “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is both a supreme feat of lyrical construction and a bad song.

What does this mean? It’s “a supreme feat of lyrical construction” because it’s hard to observe a rhyme scheme and meter while listing scores of events in roughly chronological order. I know this because anytime someone tries to update “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for the modern age, it’s a train wreck. Compare, for example, Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” with the recent remake by Fall Out Boy. The 2000s pop-punkers can’t really find the meter or keep events in order.

Even so, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” is not much of a song. It’s harmonically circular, and its melody hammers the same notes ad nauseam. Given the song’s popularity, you probably don’t agree. Billy Joel does, though. “It’s probably the worst musical thing I’ve ever written,” the Piano Man told Howard Stern in 2010.

Beyond giving it props for lyrical construction, I also must applaud “We Didn’t Start the Fire” for bringing tons of unexpected people into the pop lyric pantheon. Sure, someone like John F. Kennedy is going to come up in songs often, but novelist Boris Pasternak? Only Billy Joel is looking out for him: “Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac.”

Or maybe not. Maybe Boris Pasternak is mentioned in other pop songs. Maybe other unexpected historical figures come up in songs regularly. I decided to look.

Too Much Elvis. Not Enough Borzuya.

In 2022, a group of six researchers published a fascinating article titled “A cross-verified database of notable people, 3500BC-2018AD.” Their goal was to use information from Wikipedia to build a list of every notable person in recorded history. (Shout out to my friend Daniel Parris for showing me this paper.)

Their efforts resulted in a list of 2.29 million notable individuals. I decided to take this list of individuals and search for them in a lyric database that I have of nearly 8,000 hit songs released between 1958 and today.

I quickly realized that I didn’t need the list of 2.29 million people, though. Not only would that take a ridiculous amount of time to search through—even with a computer—but most of these “notable people” were unlikely to be mentioned in a pop song. For example, Borzuya, the 5th century Persian physician, is listed as a notable person. I would bet serious amounts of cash that Borzuya has not been used as lyrical fodder up to this point.

Borzuya, the 5th century physician who has never been mentioned in song

To save myself some time, I shrunk the list down to people whose Wikipedia articles were at least 10,000 words long and had been viewed at least 100,000 times in the 3-year sample the researchers looked at. This left me with 86,411 very notable people, including everyone from politician Aaron Burr to comedian Zeppo Marx. (Burr, of note, was mentioned in many songs heard in the popular musical Hamilton. Zeppo Marx, the straight man to his famous comedian brothers, has yet to be enshrined in song.)

Even once you get all the data together, this exercise is still tricky. Let’s say I want to look for mentions of “Julius Caesar.” The history-making emperor surely comes up in song (e.g., “Flashing Lights” by Kanye West: “I’m just saying, ‘Hey, Mona Lisa / Come home, you know you can’t roam without Caesar’”). But the word “Caesar” can also reference the salad, which is shockingly not named after him, along with a particular type of haircut bearing the name of his successor. You need to be careful to try to capture only legitimate references.

After all that name-untangling, I found that the most referenced historical person in hit songs since 1958 is Elvis Presley. Well, kind of. Jesus Christ actually gets mentioned the most, but it felt unfair including him since his name also doubles as an expletive. Because of that, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll wears this crown too.

This wasn’t terribly shocking. In the paper that the list of notable people came from, they built an index to measure the level of notability of each person. Elvis comes out very high on the list, just ahead of Gandhi and behind Napoleon. Still, when you look at the list of lyric mentions in totality, a few things jump out.

• Historical Figures are Symbols: There are very few songs specifically about, say, John Wayne. But there are many that use the actor as a macho symbol. This is the case for most historical figures mentioned in song lyrics. Bill Gates stands in for wealth. Bill Clinton stands in for womanizing. Bill Shakespeare stands in for poetry.

• Mentions of Historical Figures in Lyrics have Increased: Of course, there are examples of historical figures being mentioned in hit songs decades ago (e.g., Andrew Jackson in “The Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton), but these figures have been mentioned much more frequently in recent years. You can see this by the fact that many repeatedly mentioned figures are from the second half of the 20th century. Part of the reason for this is hip-hop, a lyric-heavy genre, has come to dominate pop culture over the last few decades.

• Historical Figures Often Come in Bunches: Occasionally, a hit song will mention one person (e.g., Marilyn Monroe in “Candle in the Wind” by Elton John), but inside and outside of hip-hop, if one is mentioned, there are usually others. “We Didn’t Start the Fire” proves a good example of this, but so do Madonna’s “Vogue,” Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and Reunion’s “Life is Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me).”

Given that the paper I got the list of historical figures from measures a level of notability for each person, we can also gauge which people are lyrically punching above the historical importance. Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson being mentioned in tons of songs isn’t a shock. They’re both quite famous.

That said, I don’t think anybody has had more unexpected appearances in pop song lyrics than Gilbert Arenas. Arenas was a three-time NBA all-star across 11 seasons, most of which were with the Washington Wizards. His glut of mentions is a shock because he wasn’t that great. You can’t use Gilbert Arenas as a symbol for a champion as you can with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant.

Gilbert Arenas, the former NBA player who rappers cannot get enough of

Arenas seems to get so many mentions for a few reasons not directly related to his playing. First, his surname is fodder for wordplay (e.g., “WHATS POPPIN” by Jack Harlow: “When this shit’s done, I’ma fill up arenas / Oh, like Gilbert Arenas”). Second, he was suspended by the NBA for storing a gun in the locker room (e.g., “Under Pressure” by Dr. Dre: “All these little haters got me back with the Nina / Got me bringin’ guns to work, Gilbert Arenas”).

In a way, Gilbert Arenas is a roadmap. If you want to be mentioned in at least a handful of hit songs, you have a few options.

1. Become famous (e.g., NBA player)

2. Have a fun name (e.g., Gilbert Arenas)

3. Commit a crime (e.g., Carry a pistol without a license)

If my book doesn’t make me a celebrity, you’ll know why I changed my name to Chrissy Stadiums and stole a candy bar from my local convenience store.

A New One
"I Know Where Mark Chen Lives" by Joyce Manor
2025 - Emo

Emo stalwarts Joyce Manor are in the midst of a new album cycle, and the singles have been delightful. Their latest mentions someone in the title: Mark Chen. Far from a celebrity, frontman Barry Johnson explained that “Mark Chen was a singer and songwriter for the bands Summer Vacation and Winter Break, which didn’t get quite as popular as they deserved to.” We should be immortalizing underrated songwriters in more songs.

An Old One
"Message of Love" by The Pretenders
1981 - New Wave

A somewhat stilted but memorable rocker from The Pretenders’ sophomore album, “Message of Love” has been on my mind because it also mentions the late Brigitte Bardot. While Billy Joel sings Bardot’s name like he’s doing roll call, Chrissie Hynde says it with an intoxicating snarl.

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If you enjoyed this piece, consider ordering my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. The book chronicles how I listened to every number one hit in history and used what I learned during the journey to write a data-driven history of popular music from 1958 through today.