Because my daughter recently sang the song at a recital and I had a Twitter mini-discussion with a friend, this has come to the forefront for me again. I have nothing but respect for Kermit the Frog, but one thing has always bugged me a bit: the question at the beginning of “The Rainbow Connection” that asks Why are there so many songs about rainbows?
Offhand, I can think of three: “Over the Rainbow” (of course), “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows” and “Rainbow in the Dark“, though I don’t think Dio had even written that last one yet when Kermit posed his question. (“The Rainbow Connection” doesn’t count, as it’s the song asking the question.)
Luckily, somebody else has done the heavy lifting and came up with the real answer: forty-two:
Fortunately, I came across a huge dataset of songs on the Billboard charts from 1890-2011. With over 38,000 entries, this isn’t the entirety of pop music output during that time, but it’s certainly a highly representative one. Using frequency of words in song titles as a proxy for songs being “about” something, I crunched the numbers…
…and found that there are only 42 (Billboard-charting) songs about rainbows.
That means 0.0011% of the songs were about rainbows, but I guess “Why are there almost statistically no songs about rainbows?” isn’t very lyrical. Props to Mark Lee for getting to the bottom of this for me!
Also, here’s one of my favorite covers of “The Rainbow Connection” (by Fifteen):