Pop songs are dumb and getting dumber, and hip-hop is the dumbest genre of them all.

Or so screamed headlines reporting a 2015 analysis which calculated "readability" scores for lyrics from US chart-topping hits of the previous decade.

Turns out the songs were mostly pitched at the reading level of US grade 2 or 3 — that's kids aged seven and eight — and had dropped half a grade from 2005.

So we thought we'd have a bit of fun and use the same technique to work out how Aussie songwriters shape up.

To qualify for our "highly scientific" lyric analysis treatment, a songwriter's work had to have been released as a single; cracked the Australian charts; and had a sole Australian songwriter credit — sorry Sia.

Yes, there are a couple of exceptions. Neil Finn is a Kiwi, but the lion's share of his biggest hits were written while he was a member of Crowded House, which was formed in Melbourne.

Also included in the analysis are all songs from Courtney Barnett's critically acclaimed debut album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.

Our sample of more than 100 songs came from some of the most prolific Aussie songwriters: Barnett, Nick Cave, Kasey Chambers, Neil Finn, Missy Higgins, Paul Kelly, Don Walker and Ross Wilson.

Where possible, lyrics were copied from an artist's website; otherwise, they were taken from lyrics sites or transcribed.

We then popped in any missing punctuation and plugged lyrics into an online calculator which analyses things like the average word length used; the number of words in each song; and ultimately, how complex (readable) the lyrics are.

So here's what we found.

Starting simple: word length

All eight songwriters are pretty similar on this measure.

Finn uses the longest words on average, just shy of four letters per word (average of 3.96 letters per word).

Check out the multisyllabic prose in the chorus of Sister Madly.

In 1988, following Crowded House's incredibly successful self-titled debut album, Finn said he had "plenty of [songwriting] ideas" but didn't see many of them to fruition.

Crowded House's second album, Temple of Low Men, was originally named The Mediocre Second Album. It featured Sister Madly along with Better Be Home Soon, When You Come and Into Temptation. Yeah, real mediocre.

The artist in our analysis who uses the shortest words, on average, is Barnett, with just over 3.5 letters per word.

Now 30, Barnett has been writing songs since she was 18. In a 2015 interview with WNYC, she said her spoken-word style evolved from shyness.

"I kind of refused to ever sing in front of anyone, so that was hard when I started performing," she said.

"But then I kind of found this comfortable, you know, way of singing that felt a bit more natural and I felt more comfortable."

Number of words in each song

Higgins wins this one hands down. She averaged 345 words in each track.

The Special Two, which reached 31 in the 2005 Triple J Hottest 100, is the wordiest of her chart-reaching hits. It has 415 words.

This isn't altogether surprising. She told The Age in 2004 that the track was like therapy after a break up.

"After a couple of days I came up with the song. I played it to that person and it was therapeutic. It was a good sorry letter."

Walker, who played keys and wrote loads of hits for Cold Chisel, averaged fewest words in each song — just 184.

The Things I Love in You has just 114 words.

Walker told The Music in 2015 that he tried to spread the songwriting load on Cold Chisel's latest studio album The Perfect Crime.

"I think Cold Chisel albums are always better if everybody writes. I think without that — if it's just me contributing — then it's too much of one voice," he said.

"Also I like the other guys' songs."

It didn't work all that well. Of the 15 tracks that ended up on the album, nine were written by Walker alone.

Wordiest and punchiest tracks

Overall, songs with the most and fewest words were written by none other than Kelly.

The first track on Paul Kelly and The Coloured Girls' debut album Gossip contained fewest words. It is, to be fair, mostly instrumental. Take a (quick) listen.

Bradman was released as a single with Leaps and Bounds. It tells the first part of the legendary Australian batsman's life story.

At seven-and-a-half minutes, it's no wonder it contains the most words.

According to his book How to Make Gravy, Kelly sent The Don the single and a video.

In his reply, Bradman said "he didn't have a video player but would watch the clip soon at his daughter's place".

Readability (or where it gets complicated)

There are loads of different tests for readability, or how easily a reader can understand text.

Many have double-barrelled names, like the Coleman-Liau index, Dale-Chall formula and Flesch-Kincaid grade level. (Our favourite is the SMOG, or "Simple Measure of Gobbledygook".)

They generally plug in values for things like word length, number of words, number of syllables and sentence length into an equation.

The number that pops out indicates the US school grade level, or years of education needed, to read that particular text.

Based on our analysis, the most readable Australian songwriters pitched their lyrics at a US fourth grade reading level (9-year-olds): Cave, Chambers, Kelly and Wilson.

Cave also had the most consistently readable lyrics across all songs analysed.

Love Letter turned out to be Cave's most readable song, likely because it has relatively few words.

After releasing the album Push the Sky Away in 2013 with The Bad Seeds, Cave told the ABC that his early songs were "more like screenplays", with a story arc. But his songwriting has evolved.

"I think these days the lyrics are more abstracted, so there's no linear story as such, but certainly a visualness about them and atmosphere that you kind of enter at the beginning of the song and are kind of released at the end," he said.

Short, list-like sentences boosted Kasey Chambers' readability scores for her track Nothing At All.

Chambers injects personal experience into the songs she pens — a habit that she's cultivated from day dot.

When she was a teenager, her father took her to see American singer-songwriter Roseanne Cash in Adelaide.

But when country singer Lucinda Williams walked on stage, Chambers said she was "just blown away".

Few intros are as immediately recognisable as the deep driving drums and harmonica combo of Kelly's Dumb Things.

With loads of single-syllable words, the lyrics are also very readable.

After Kelly recorded the song (and whole lot of other demos) with The Coloured Girls, he passed it onto Sydney filmmaker Yahoo Serious, who was looking for songs to appear in his film Young Einstein.

Kelly had a vague idea that Dumb Things' tempo was a bit quick, but Serious had other ideas.

Back to Kelly's book, How to Make Gravy:

While Dumb Things reached 36 on the Australian Singles Chart, the most readable song Wilson wrote for Daddy Cool spent 10 weeks on top of the national charts.

As an aside, have you ever wondered why some people drop their pants when they hear Eagle Rock?

In an interview with Newcastle Live, Wilson said he suspected it's because Australians are a creative bunch.

(Credit for starting the bizarre tradition is usually attributed to University of Queensland engineering students, but dack-dropping has incurred repercussions since.)

Now we get to the lyrics with the highest reading level.

Barnett averages around a grade 5 reading level (or around 10 years old).

Take Pedestrian At Best: it's pretty long, lyric-wise — just shy of 400 words — and has relatively long sentences that run together.

But the winner is ...

(drumroll)

Higgins, with a grade 6 (11-year-old) average reading level for her tunes.

The Special Two is pitched at the highest reading level.

Yeah, OK, there are limitations to the analysis

This analysis was designed to examine Australian songwriters and their lyric complexity.

But anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of statistics knows that averages don't tell the whole story.

We saw loads of variability between songs penned by the same person.

Walker's Khe Sanh, for instance, had a grade 6 (that's students aged 11) readability score, but Hold me Tight turned out to be pitched at grade two (seven year olds).

Besides, readability is a super-simplistic way of determining the level of education needed to understand lyrics.

A passage that's easy to read isn't necessarily "dumber" than a more complex sentence.

Readability scores neglect to capture the wordplay, double entendre and rich, deep emotion for which many of these artists are renowned.

Check out this evocative piece of imagery from Barnett's Dead Fox:

Or this bit of mature-aged content from Kelly's Darling it Hurts:

That song is pitched at around a grade 4 readability level, but a nine-year-old kid wouldn't likely twig to what he was singing about — you'd hope.

Also, sometimes word and sentence simplicity just doesn't matter when it comes to actually understanding a song.

You might find Bob Dylan's mumbly jumbly lyrical smears harder to deduce than, for instance, the perfectly pronounced prose of Cake's John McCrea.

In other words, readability is, by no means, any indication of an artist's songwriting prowess.

So this weekend, while you're taking in the triple j Hottest 100, listening to new music or reliving old favourites, take a new appreciation for the lyrics.

And if you like songs with few words or short ones, don't feel any less intellectual than someone who enjoys garrulous, effusive, verbose songwriters.